On the Adoption of ICT Best Practices in Brazilian Federal Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

ICT governance aims at guiding a better investment of technological resources so that the organization improves its performance and productivity. To this end, organizations often employ well-tested, and documented processes also called ICT best practices. Due to its own nature and way of management, public institutions are examples of organizations that need specific studies to implement ICT best practices. The focus of this work is to investigate how ICT best practices are employed by the Brazilian Federal Higher Education Institutions (IFES). We use two regulations to perform such analysis: the IFES IT Director Plans (PDTI) documents and the IN04/2014 normative instruction of the Brazilian federal government that provide guidelines about how institutions should hire their ICT solutions. With information gathered from such documents, and also some related literature materials, was possible to determine an initial set of ICT best practices that could suit the needs of the IFES. This initial set was used to build a survey that was sent to all of the IFES. The results show heterogeneity in the use of best practices by the Brazilian universities that may be related to particular characteristics of each institution such as the size of the ICT department and the academic degree of its employees.