Ruben Filipe de Sousa Pereira

• Ph.D. / M.Sc. in Information Systems
• Professor (Assistant) at Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon

Nowadays, over 20% of organizations’ worldwide capital expenditure goes toward Information Technology (IT). Hence IT Governance (ITG) is essential to establish a mutually beneficial connection between IT and the business. To deploy ITG, some factors, such as Organizational Culture (OC), should be considered. This study focuses on how the different...

Shadow information technology (SIT) revolves around systems that are hidden but are still managed by the same business entities. It consists of the use of devices, software, systems and applications without the information technology (IT) department’s approval. Employees use IT without the knowledge of the IT department, and it creates a gap in com...

Among current IT work cultures, DevOps stands out as one of the most adopted worldwide. The focus of this culture is on bridging the gap between development and operations teams, enabling collaborative effort toward quickly producing software, without sacrificing its quality and support. DevOps is used to tackle a variety of issues; as such, there...

Information technology (IT) has become vital to organizations' success. For this reason, IT Governance (ITG) is necessary to control better solutions, sustainable development, and better decision-making. Since an organization's advantage lies in its employees' behavior, this study analyses the impact of ITG institutionalization on the key dimension...

Business continuity refers to the planning and preparation done ahead of time to ensure that an organization's essential business processes can continue to work in the event of an emergency. Natural disasters, business crises, pandemics, workplace crime, or any other incident that disrupts business operations are examples of emergencies. Maturity m...

In an era of digital transformation, where in the last decades has increased the need of embrace change rapidly, it’s important that organizations make their transformation in the path of continue being competitive. To this, organizations have started adopting agile methodologies so that they can respond faster to the daily change. DevOps allows co...

Many different information technology frameworks have been proposed to assist organizations implementing information technology. However, these frameworks are complex, difficult to implement, and overlap with one another making their simultaneous implementation even more difficult to accomplish by organizations. This study proposes to develop an ov...

Information technology (IT) is increasingly important to organizations and has become essential to the development of sustainable business growth. It is therefore necessary to adopt IT governance (ITG) mechanisms to ensure better solutions, sustainable growth, and better decision-making. As employee behavior is a competitive differential, this work...

This research aims to understand how Business process management (BPM) can be applied for the improvement of Information Technology service management (ITSM) processes. A case study is conducted for the improvement of the time performance of the incident management process, since it is pointed as a quick win for ITSM. The results obtained identifie...

Information Technology governance (ITG) calls for the definition and implementation of formal practices at the highest level in the organization, involving structures, processes and relational practices for the creation of business value from IT investments. However, determining the right ITG practices remains a complex endeavor. Previous studies i...

Information technology (IT) service management is considered a collection of frameworks that support organizations managing services. The implementation of these kinds of frameworks is constantly increasing in the IT service provider domain. The main objective is to define and manage IT services through its life cycle. However, from observing the l...

Facing one of the most challenging pandemics for organizational modus operandi (COVID-19), organizations are struggling for operational and strategic support. The adoption of remote work (RW) is increasing. For economic reasons, competitive advantage, or even as a pandemic response (business continuity plan), RW is a domain worth further investigat...

Internet of things (IoT) is considered a key technology for the Industry 4.0 revolution. Information Technology (IT) governance (ITG) is now an increasingly important tool for organizations to align their IT strategy and infrastructures with the organizations' business objectives. The most adopted ITG framework is COBIT, which defines seven enabler...

Purpose Data can nowadays be seen as the main asset of organizations and data leaks have a considerable impact on the organization’s image, revenues and possible consequences to the affected clients. One of the most critical industries is the bank. Information security frameworks (ISF) have been created to assist organizations and other frameworks...

The Emergency Departments (ED) of hospitals are poised for continuous improvement due to increasing demand. The ED are places where the efficiency of the services provided can save lives and therefore it should be seen as an area of maximum interest for process optimisation. This research aims at verifying if the application of Business Process Man...

Businesses today need to respond to customer needs at an unprecedented speed. Driven by this need for speed, many companies are rushing to the DevOps movement. DevOps, the combination of development and operations, is a new way of thinking in the software engineering domain that recently received much attention. Since DevOps has recently been intro...

Business process management (BPM) is an approach focused on the continuous improvement of business processes, providing for this a collection of best practices. These best practices enable the redesign of business processes to meet the desired performance. IT service management (ITSM) defines the management of IT operations as a service. There are...

Businesses today need to respond to customer needs at an unprecedented speed. Driven by this need for speed, many companies are rushing to the DevOps movement. DevOps, the combination of Development and Operations, is a new way of thinking in the software engineering domain that recently received much attention. Since DevOps has recently been intro...

The pace of information technology evolution calls for governance. Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT) is the main framework for information technology governance (ITG) and defines the concept of IT governance enablers as a critical step for any governance decision or path. This investigation aims to clarify the enab...

Health information systems have been developed to help hospital managers steer daily operations, including key performance indicators (KPIs) for monitoring on a time-aggregated basis. Yet, current literature lacks in proposals of productivity dashboards to assist hospitals stakeholders. This research focuses on two related problems: (1) hospital or...

Maturity models can be seen as support tools for an organization. Their importance is increasing in the scientific community and IT (Information Technology) organizations are starting to implement them. The main objective of maturity models is to evaluate and improve the organization’s practices by creating an improvement roadmap. However, the util...

COBIT 5 is a widely-used framework for implementing sound governance of enterprise IT (GEIT). Currently, the ISACA’s official implementation solution follows a sequentially ordered process, raising several issues related with lack of commitment from top management and misaligned solutions. Nevertheless, new project life-cycle strategies have emerge...

Background and purpose: This research aims to investigate which benefits one may expect using Maturity Models in Configuration Management (CM) domain. CM is a support process that helps organizations have better management of their infrastructure. Its importance, in the Information Technology (IT) domain, has increased in recent years, despite this...

Particular attention to IT Governance is required when the pervasive use of technology has created critical dependencies on IT for organizational performance and prosperity. This study attempts to assess the importance of specific mechanisms for the effectiveness of IT governance in the context of higher educational institutions. Using a qualitativ...

This research work presents a prototype model, focused on an android application, to handle the problem of finding an available parking space during driving process for all type of road vehicles in a city using historical data and prediction methods, where there is not any type of real-time system to provide information about the current state of t...

This research aims to investigate how DevOps culture can be applied in the incident management process. The authors believe, based on experience as practitioners, that agile software development methodologies are fair enough to be used on Incident Management process, to quickly restore the business interruption. An application management team which...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to obtain a list of recommendations addressed by the information technology (IT) governance enablers in relation to IoT implementation. The reason behind this it is the lack of information about these instances which could the organizations to be more effective when implementing IoT. Design/methodology/approach...

IT governance calls for the definition and implementation of formal mechanisms at the highest level in the organization taking into account structures, processes and relational mechanisms for the creation of business value from IT investments. Several factors can influence IT Governance implementation success. Culture is one of these factors and th...

Purpose Robotic process automation (RPA) seeks to automate business processes, using software robots that interact with systems through their user interface, improving efficiency and reducing costs. However, some critical steps, such as identifying processes suitable for RPA automation, can have a tremendous impact in organizations if a wrong proce...

DevSecOps is an emerging paradigm that breaks the Security Team Silo into the DevOps Methodology and adds security practices to the Software Development Cycle (SDL). Security practices in SDL are important to avoid data breaches, guarantee compliance with the law and is an obligation to protect customers data. This study aims to identify metrics te...

Purpose The digital paradigm people live in today, which drastically increased the consumption of data, is a threat to their privacy. To create a high level of privacy protection for its citizens, the European Union proposed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which introduces obligations for organizations regarding the storing, processi...

This research work presents an information system to handle the problem of real-time guidance towards free charging slot in a city using past date and prediction and collaborative algorithms since there is no real-time system available to provide information if a charging spot is free or occupied. We explore the prediction approach using past data...

As the adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) rises in the healthcare institutions, these resources’ importance increases because of the clinical information they contain about patients. However, the unstructured information in the form of the narrative present in those records makes it hard to extract and structure useful clinical informati...

Emergency departments are an important area of a hospital, being the major entry point to the healthcare system. One of the most important issues regarding patient experience are the emergency department waiting times. In order to help hospitals improving their patient experience, the authors will perform a study where the Random Forest algorithm w...

Organizations face a challenge on the emerging technology-enabled businesses to prevent fraud and mitigate risks. Information technology (IT) advancements also provided the possibility of ongoing risk assessment and ongoing control assessment on the growing data volume in the digital age. Although organizations perceive the benefits of continuous a...

Health information systems are key assets in managing health units’ daily operations. Nevertheless, literature is scarce concerning information systems for increasing and managing hospital productivity. This study aims at filling such gap through an empirical research based on large Portuguese hospital. Specifically, a dashboard prototype is propos...

Health information systems are key assets in managing health units’ daily operations. Nevertheless, literature is scarce concerning information sys-tems for increasing and managing hospital productivity. This study aims at filling such gap through an empirical research based on large Portuguese hospital. Specifically, a dashboard prototype is propo...

Information Technology (IT) has become fundamental for most organizations since it is vital to their sustainability, development and success. This pervasive use led organizations to a critical dependency on IT. Despite the benefits, it exposes organizations to several risks. Hence, a significant focus on Enterprise Governance of IT (EGIT) is requir...

The assessment of Enterprise Governance of IT (EGIT) frameworks and standards such as COBIT 5 and ISO 27001, when adopted simultaneously, implies an unreasonable effort because each framework and standard defines its own scope, definitions, and terminologies. Using these frameworks and standards independently prevents organizations from achieving t...

The main purpose of this research is to determine the productivity gains from the merge of two traditional IT teams: Development and Operations into a single DevOps team implementing 6 DevOps capabilities On this research the authors go through the existing DevOps literature to better frame this research and the reader. To answer the formulated res...

As the adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) rises in the healthcare institutions, these resources’ importance increases because of the clin-ical information they contain about patients. However, the unstructured infor-mation in the form of the narrative present in those records makes it hard to ex-tract and structure useful clinical inform...

The IT incident management process requires a correct categorization to attribute incident tickets to the right resolution group and obtain as quickly as possible an operational system, impacting the minimum as possible the business and costumers. In this work, we introduce automatic text classification, demonstrating the application of several nat...

The assessment of Enterprise Governance of IT (EGIT) frameworks and standards such as COBIT 5 and ISO 27001, when adopted simultaneously, implies an unreasonable effort because each framework and standard defines its own scope, definitions, and terminologies. Using these frameworks and standards independently prevents organizations from achieving t...

This research aims to develop an information technology (IT) maturity model for incident management (IM) process that merges the most known IT frameworks’ practices. Our proposal intends to help organizations overcome the current limitations of multiframework implementation by informing organizations about frameworks’ overlap before their implement...

The pervasive use of technology has created a critical dependency on IT that requires particular attention to IT Governance (ITG). A set of ITG mechanisms involving structures, processes and relational mechanisms can be considered to implement IT governance and enhance business/IT alignment. Universities are organizations with a specific context an...

Effective knowledge management practices in organizations are focused on knowledge creation and knowledge transfer activities. Thus, intelligence and competencies matters at the organizational workplace. For most knowledge intensive organizations is fundamental the continuous availability and development of domain expertise. This paper describes an...

Models supported by ICT tools are developed to raise collaboration and share of resources in urban logistics process, in a kind of “Logistics-as-uber” concept, which allows implementing operations such as “GoodsPooling” concept, equivalent to carpooling concept: daily use of home/work trips to pick and deliver goods on the way. This solution can al...

The pervasive use of technology has created a critical dependency on Information Technology (IT) that requires IT Governance (ITG). ITG calls for the definition and implementation of formal mechanisms at the highest level in the organization taking into account structures, processes and relational mechanisms for the creation of business value from...

Effective IT governance is determined by how the IT function is organized and where the IT decision -making authority is located within the organization. Three different IT governance structures may be considered: centralised, decentralised and federal. The appropriacy of these structures is based on the organisation ́s context. This article aim s...

The pervasive use of technology in organizations to address the increased services complexity has created a critical dependency on Information Technology (IT) that calls to a specific focus on IT Governance (ITG). However, determining the right ITG mechanisms remains a complex endeavor. This paper uses Design Science Research and proposes an explor...

Information Technology (IT) has been used in large organizations since the 1950s for internal and external purposes. The pervasive use of technology in organizations has created a critical dependency on IT that calls for a specific focus on IT Governance (ITG). However, determining the right ITG mechanisms remains a complex endeavor. In this paper...

The pervasive use of technology in organizations to address the increased services complexity has created a critical dependency on information technology (IT) that calls to a specific focus on IT Governance (ITG). However, determining the right ITG mechanisms remains a complex endeavor. This paper uses Design Science Research and proposes an explor...

IT is becoming pervasive in all organizations as well as regulatory compliance requirements are becoming increasingly pervasive and burdensome. Several IT frameworks, which have been criticized by many researchers, exist to help organizations to mitigate IT compliance issues. However, the majority of the organizations keep being reactive when deali...

Over the last few decades various regulations emerged and an auditor is the last line of defence against the risks of non compliance. Therefore, Information Technology (IT) Audit Management (AM) is a crucial process for most organizations. However, it is a complex process and current IT frameworks are not helping since they are seen as complex, ove...

Information Technology (IT) has been used in large organizations since the 1950s, for internal and external purposes. The pervasive use of technology in organizations has created a critical dependency on IT that calls for a specific focus on IT Governance (ITG) that is essential to ensure the Business/IT alignment objectives. However, determining t...

Case studies are a valuable way to look at the world around us and have been gaining special importance in the last years in the information tech- nology area. However, some problems, as for example the lack of rigor or the dependency of a single case exploration, preclude case study generalization. Therefore, we propose to perform an extensive lit...

Nowadays information technology (IT) is present in all organiza- tions. This pervasive use of technology has created a critical dependency on IT that calls for a specific focus on IT Governance (ITG). Organizations with ef- fective governance have actively adopted a set of ITG mechanisms. However, ITG mechanisms are not well defined among the liter...

Over the last few decades various regulations emerged and an auditor is the last line of defence. Despite the importance of IT audit, current IT frameworks, designed to help organizations, are seen as complex, overlapping each other and hard to implement. The main contribution of this research is to model the IT audit process/architecture based in...

Lack of business/IT (BIT) alignment affects e-governance initiatives success. Information Technology Governance (ITG) has been recognized as a CIO top-10 issue for more than five years and has risen in priority between 2007 and 2009. Several Frameworks exist to help organizations in ITG implementation but lack scientific viewpoint, are complex, and...

IT Governance (ITG) has been recognized as a CIO top-10 issue for more than five years and has risen in priority between 2007 and 2009. There are several Frameworks to help organizations in ITG implementation but these lack scientific viewpoint, are complex, and also overlap each other. However, besides the existence of several frameworks to help o...

Audit is an independent activity that employs standardized methods to evaluate and improve the effect in the process of compliance and control in order to help the organization achieve its goals. Nowadays, the current audit management process is costly and requires a high effort since there is a high amount of resources and used assets needed. This...

ITG has been recognized as a CIO top-10 issue for more than five years and has risen in priority between 2007 and 2009. Several Frameworks exist to help organizations in ITG implementation but lack scientific viewpoint, are complex, and also overlap each other. In this paper we make a literature review to leverage the ITG Contingency factors, ITG g...

In the last 20 years, the use of IT by organizations has increased and ITG discipline is today a major concern. ITG has been recognized as a CIO top-10 issue for more than five years and has risen in priority between 2007 and 2009. Best practices and frameworks have been proposed in order to help organizations in ITG implementation. However, such p...

ITIL is the most popular "best practices" framework for managing Information Technology (IT) services. However, implementing ITIL is not only very difficult but also there are no recommendations and guidelines for it. As a result, ITIL implementations are usually long, expensive and risky. In a previous paper we proposed a maturity model to assess...

Information Technology Infra-structure Library (ITIL) is the most popular “best practices” framework for managing Information Technology (IT) services. However, implementing ITIL not only is very difficult but there also are no best practices for implementing ITIL. As a result, ITIL implementations are usually long, expensive, and risky. In this pa...

Information Technology Infra-structure Library (ITIL) is the most popular “best practices” framework for managing Information Technology (IT) services. However, implementing ITIL not only is very difficult but there also are no best practices for implementing ITIL. As a result, ITIL implementations are usually long, expensive, and risky. In this pa...