Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Governance Processes: A Case Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I think you should revise the paper trying to clarify the aim of the paper in the introduction. Introduction is too detailed so it recommended to clarify the scope, aim, context, and significance of the research being conducted by summarizing current understanding and background information about the topic. the idea of the research is not very clear. You must explain the relevance of your research based in the literature as well with methodology and empirical analysis. The paper does not have a clear presentation of the methods used in the empirical analysis. Methods of analysis are not presented as well. The results could be supported with deeper interpretation because now it is only mostly analysis of the respondent answers without deeper interpretation.

Author Response

Dear Reviewers and Editor,

 

We would like to thank the editor for the work, as well as the reviewers for the careful handling and review of our manuscript. All the comments were carefully analyzed and taken into consideration during the peer review process and we do apologize for not making it clear. The new reviewed version presents the matters that we have addressed. We are confident that this revised version greatly benefits from the careful work of the reviewers.

 

Following, we present the comments to the reviewers.

 

Response to Reviewer 1 comments

 

Thank you very much for your remarks and suggestions. We have taken your suggestions into consideration as follows:

 

Reasons for recommending a major revision

 

I think you should revise the paper trying to clarify the aim of the paper in the introduction. Introduction is too detailed so it recommended to clarify the scope, aim, context, and significance of the research being conducted by summarizing current understanding and background information about the topic. the idea of the research is not very clear. You must explain the relevance of your research based in the literature as well with methodology and empirical analysis.

Response to comment 1: We added in the introduction the importance of conducting the research and the scope of the research. In addition, we put the method used to conduct the research and its main contribution.

The paper does not have a clear presentation of the methods used in the empirical analysis. Methods of analysis are not presented as well.

Response to comment 2: We added in Section 3 the details of the steps that we used in the research.

 

The results could be supported with deeper interpretation because now it is only mostly analysis of the respondent answers without deeper interpretation.

Response to comment 3: We added in Section 4.2, some works that support our findings.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I think the authors need to have a plan for educating all employees on the ICT processes since the results of the survey shows some employees apparently do not know what the processes actually are.  If they do not have the basic processes (or do not understand them), then it is not appropriate to make them more complex.

The main contribution of this work was to identify the situation of CADE in relation to its
48 ICT Governance processes, mainly in relation to the processes already implemented, as well as ICT
49 processes that need to be fully implemented. What do you mean by "situation"? 

The 2 section The 56 3 section Do you mean Section 2 or the "second section"?

lines 96-106  Connection to study?  2.1 needs to have a summary statement that ties it to the study.

Service outsourcing--Since the entity is outsourcing, more focus needs to be on how to evaluate which suppliers have conformed to your model in the selection process.

Related works

This new practice increases
433 transparency between areas and makes it possible to establish more clearly the responsibilities for the
434 results of each activity in the process. Why is this important? What will be the result? How does it connect with the your model?

This answer allows us to conclude that the two respondents did not
470 express the reality of the agency, since the same respondents stated that this process does not exist in
471 the question that addressed the implementation of the process. In the artifacts of the PDTI process,
472 60% of respondents stated that the agency has 10 or more artifacts implemented, out of a total of 12
473 artifacts existing in this process. 20% of CGTI workers stated the existence of all artifacts. Among the
474 12 artifacts, the least known by the survey respondents is the SWOT Analysis Model, in which only
475 40% of the participants stated that it was implemented in the agency, as shown in Figure 6 (b).  If two out of ten respondents said it was implemented when it was not, on what are they basing their statements?  Does this mean they do not understand the importance of it or they misunderstood the question? This is typical of the other processes that they were asked about.  Some said it was implemented; some said it was not. 

How will these people accept your recommendations for more processes and more complexity of existing processes?

 

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewers and Editor,

 

We would like to thank the editor for the work, as well as the reviewers for the careful handling and review of our manuscript. All the comments were carefully analyzed and taken into consideration during the peer review process and we do apologize for not making it clear. The new reviewed version presents the matters that we have addressed. We are confident that this revised version greatly benefits from the careful work of the reviewers.

 

Following, we present the comments to the reviewers.

 

Response to Reviewer 2 comments

 

Thank you very much for your remarks and suggestions. We have taken your suggestions into consideration as follows:

 

Reasons for recommending a major revision

I think the authors need to have a plan for educating all employees on the ICT processes since the results of the survey shows some employees apparently do not know what the processes actually are.  If they do not have the basic processes (or do not understand them), then it is not appropriate to make them more complex.

Response to comment 1: After analyzing the survey, we held some interviews with the participants to understand the differences. Some did not really know the processes and we did an explanation in relation to the basic processes.

The main contribution of this work was to identify the situation of CADE in relation to its
ICT Governance processes, mainly in relation to the processes already implemented, as well as ICT
processes that need to be fully implemented. What do you mean by "situation"? 

Response to comment 2: We wanted to say CADE's current scenario regarding ICT processes. We changed the situation to the current scenario.

The 2 section The 3 section Do you mean Section 2 or the "second section"?

Response to comment 3: We corrected the detailing of the Sections. The right one is Section 2.

lines 96-106  Connection to study?  2.1 needs to have a summary statement that ties it to the study.

Response to comment 4: We revised the text.

Service outsourcing--Since the entity is outsourcing, more focus needs to be on how to evaluate which suppliers have conformed to your model in the selection process.

Response to comment 5: We changed the second paragraph of the section.

Related works

This new practice increases transparency between areas and makes it possible to establish more clearly the responsibilities for the results of each activity in the process. Why is this important? What will be the result? How does it connect with the your model?

 

Response to comment 6: ICT processes need to be transparent and all employees in the organization need to understand the processes and activities that their responsibilities are in relation to each task. Thus, the transparency of the processes adopted by an organization, avoids the waste of ICT resources, improves the performance and reduces spending of the organization. Our objective was to present the organization's current scenario, allowing it to identify weaknesses and improve its ICT processes.

This answer allows us to conclude that the two respondents did not express the reality of the agency, since the same respondents stated that this process does not exist in the question that addressed the implementation of the process. In the artifacts of the PDTI process, 60% of respondents stated that the agency has 10 or more artifacts implemented, out of a total of 12 artifacts existing in this process. 20% of CGTI workers stated the existence of all artifacts. Among the 12 artifacts, the least known by the survey respondents is the SWOT Analysis Model, in which only 40% of the participants stated that it was implemented in the agency, as shown in Figure 6 (b).  If two out of ten respondents said it was implemented when it was not, on what are they basing their statements?  Does this mean they do not understand the importance of it or they misunderstood the question? This is typical of the other processes that they were asked about.  Some said it was implemented; some said it was not. 

How will these people accept your recommendations for more processes and more complexity of existing processes?

Response to comment 7: We conducted some interviews with stakeholders and interviewees so that we could understand the discrepancies between the responses. Some employees stated that they did not know the process, which may represent a lack of disclosure of the organization's ICT Governance actions. We carried out an analysis on the discrepancies related to the lack of knowledge of the existing processes in the organization. We identified, for example, a member of the team with less than 1 year of experience, who stated in 75% of the questions “Not having this information”, or “Not apply”. The CGTI coordinator informed us of the need to create and map a process for integrating new employees. This process must be delivered to the new team members to facilitate their setting in the organization. We propose improvements in the processes and we are monitoring their implementation. In addition, we suggest that the organization conduct training with its employees, so that everyone knows the organization's business processes.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

It is an interesting work especially in the technical dimension. In the scientific component it has several inaccuracies that can be improved.

Improvement suggestions:

- It should be clearer in the literature review section the differences between ISO/IEC 38500 and COBIT.

- The challenges to implement the digital transformation in government institutions should be better described and addressed.

- I don’t know exactly the citation rules requested by this journal but for me it is somehow strange to have integral citations without mentioning the page numbers. Please verify it.

- The first sentence of line 162 is difficult to read. Please consider restructure it.

- This study has limitations in terms of generalising the results. The CGTI has only 10 employees. Why were not several government agencies considered to increase the sample size?

- It should be clearer the organizational structure of CGTI. For example, presenting the organizational structure could be a good idea.

- 50% of respondents have less than 1 year experience at CADE. What are the reasons for this apparent instability?

- The survey structure should be presented in the methodology section.

- The quality of the images is relatively poor. The legend (y axis) is not fully readable in some of them.

- The results and work done by the authors are interesting. From a technical point of view it is a good document. However, there are several gaps in the scientific component since the results obtained are not compared with other studies in the field.

- Section 5 does not address the reliability component of a case study. Please for more information read: https://library.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/1924175/Casestudy_Research.pdf

- The adoption of a mixed-method approach could bring more interesting and robust results. Why not complement the survey with semi-structured interviews?

- The authors should properly address the theoretical and practical contributions of this study in the conclusions section.

- Future work suggestion should be more precise and detailed. Currently, it is too vague.

Author Response

Dear Reviewers and Editor,

 

We would like to thank the editor for the work, as well as the reviewers for the careful handling and review of our manuscript. All the comments were carefully analyzed and taken into consideration during the peer review process and we do apologize for not making it clear. The new reviewed version presents the matters that we have addressed. We are confident that this revised version greatly benefits from the careful work of the reviewers.

 

Following, we present the comments to the reviewers.

 

Response to Reviewer 3 comments

 

Thank you very much for your remarks and suggestions. We have taken your suggestions into consideration as follows:

 

Reasons for recommending a major revision

It is an interesting work especially in the technical dimension. In the scientific component it has several inaccuracies that can be improved.

Improvement suggestions:

1. - It should be clearer in the literature review section the differences between ISO/IEC 38500 and COBIT.

Response to comment 1: We added in subsection 2.1 a paragraph with the differences between ISO/IEC 38500 and COBIT.

 

2. - The challenges to implement the digital transformation in government institutions should be better described and addressed.

Response to comment 2: We added a paragraph at the end of Section 2.1 with challenges to implement the digital transformation.

3. - I don’t know exactly the citation rules requested by this journal but for me it is somehow strange to have integral citations without mentioning the page numbers. Please verify it.

Response to comment 3: The citations are in accordance with the template for the authors, provided on the MDPI page.

4. - The first sentence of line 162 is difficult to read. Please consider restructure it.

Response to comment 4:  We restructured the sentence.

5. - This study has limitations in terms of generalising the results. The CGTI has only 10 employees. Why were not several government agencies considered to increase the sample size?

Response to comment 5: In Section 5.3, we mention that the population can be a threat. What doesn’t make the research unfeasible, since our focus was to analyze the specific scenario of CADE, which is a very important agency of the Brazilian Federal Public Administration and with specific ICT activities that need to be standardized. In future works, we will replicate the research in other agencies and compare the results. Now the focus of the research was to improve the performance of CADE's ICT processes.

6. - It should be clearer the organizational structure of CGTI. For example, presenting the organizational structure could be a good idea.

Response to comment 6:  We added CGTI's organizational structure in Section 3.0.

7. - 50% of respondents have less than 1 year experience at CADE. What are the reasons for this apparent instability?

Response to comment 7: The agency's ICT coordination (CGTIC) is new (it was created 2 years ago) and the majority of employees were selected through a public contest less than 2 years ago. The oldest employees are the ones who came from other government agencies (and were assigned) to compose CGTIC.

8. - The survey structure should be presented in the methodology section.

Response to comment 8:  We added in section 3.2 the URL containing all the issues covered in the survey. In addition, we explain how the survey was structured.

9. - The quality of the images is relatively poor. The legend (y axis) is not fully readable in some of them.

Response to comment 9: We improve the quality of all images

10. - The results and work done by the authors are interesting. From a technical point of view it is a good document. However, there are several gaps in the scientific component since the results obtained are not compared with other studies in the field.

Response to comment 10:  We added in Section 4.2, some works that support our findings. 

 

11. - Section 5 does not address the reliability component of a case study. Please for more information read: https://library.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/1924175/Casestudy_Research.pdf

 

Response to comment 11:  We read the document and added the questions related to reliability of the case study in the second paragraph of Section 5.

12. - The adoption of a mixed-method approach could bring more interesting and robust results. Why not complement the survey with semi-structured interviews?

Response to comment 12: We conducted interviews with the organization's two stakeholders to understand the divergences in the perception of employees. We made it clear in the document that these interviews were conducted.

13. - The authors should properly address the theoretical and practical contributions of this study in the conclusions section.

Response to comment 13: We have added the suggested improvements.

- Future work suggestion should be more precise and detailed. Currently, it is too vague.

Response to comment 14: We added more information to future work.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

There are still grammatical errors that must be corrected.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to thank the reviewers for the careful handling and review of our manuscript. A general correction was performed, focusing in spelling and grammatical errors. Also, the standardization of numerical and other types of notation was done.

Best regards,

Reviewer 3 Report

I appreciate the revision work carried out, which significantly improved the manuscript.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to thank the reviewers for the careful handling and review of our manuscript. A general correction was performed, focusing in spelling and grammatical errors. Also, the standardization of numerical and other types of notation was done.

Best regards,