Abstract
Summary of the research The research question was to determine whether the IT governance and IT outsourcing strategies of large private companies would be practical for the NRW police and how do they differ. IT outsourcing is a common strategy in private commerce, but this relatively new for police organisations. In the past, the police have copied trends from the private sector after a delay of about ten years. In most cases, consultancy companies have advised the government to do this. But it is not useful to follow trends when companies in the private sector have already developed new strategies to adjust for errors. This research aimed to discover how large companies manage IT governance and IT outsourcing in comparison with the police. IT governance is part of governance and IT outsourcing belongs to IT governance. In this research I described how governance in private companies and in the public service works. The intent was to find an IT company (T-systems and Telekom), a multimedia media company (Bertelsmann) and a company from the producing sector (Ruhrpumpen). This partly involved identifying their current outsourcing situation. A further step was to develop an IT governance cycle for each organisation in accordance with the COBIT framework and IT governance focus areas: strategic alignment, resource management, value management and performance management. The next step was to identify core IT capabilities in large organisations in accordance with Lacity and Willcocks’ theory of nine core IT capabilities. In the final step, these capabilities were mapped to the COBIT focus areas to develop an IT governance model which could be adapted for the police force. Case studies were conducted at the Ministry of the Interior, three police authorities and large private companies based on Yin’s case study methods. The results were analysed using a multiple-case and cross-case analysis. My initial assumption was that the police would have more IT weaknesses and private companies would have better IT organisation and IT architecture. This would have made it easy to see clearer results. However, the police have made up ground in recent years. Nevertheless, I identified several core IT capabilities which need to be improved to optimise the police’s current IT strategy.