Gestão de contratos e sua contribuição para a governança de tecnologia da informação: um estudo de caso em uma indústria brasileira de grande porte

摘要

Information Technology (IT) has had an important role in meeting business needs. Through IT, companies achieve greater productivity, agility and speed in dealing with its stakeholders, considering that the deadlines for meeting these demands are becoming shorter. In an attempt to meet these business needs, companies began to invest in IT outsourcing, redirecting their efforts to the core business of the company. This way of acting adds complexity to the company’s management once it increases the number of people involved in the process. This management complexity increases as new activities / business processes are being outsourced. As outsourcing grows, there is the need to develop an IT contract management so that companies can establish the best way to monitor and control outsourcing. Such monitoring and controlling is introduced in IT through governance practices that try to promote improvements on technology performance in business companies, adopting a series of models that can influence corporate behavior and direct the IT activities. Based on this, this study aims to how IT Governance is affected by the IT Contract Management in an outsourcing context. In order to do this, this work presents as theoretical foundations the principles of IT governance, IT outsourcing and IT contracts. Based on these principles, it was done a qualitative study of the explanatory type carried out in a single case study. This study was done in a multinational industry that has approximately 45 000 employees in their units around the world. The aim was to obtain the data through the collection of documents, observations and semi-structured interviews. These interviews were done with IT professionals that were directly involved in IT governance issues, outsourcing and business contracts. The collected data were analyzed through the content analysis technique of the categorical type and enunciation in order to establish the necessary conclusions of the proposed objective of this study. The results indicate that the objective this study was achieved because, according to the analysis of the documents and interviews, IT Contract Management supports IT Governance. It provides technical and standard procedures that allow the alignment of the IT Governance elements according to what is determined by the company. This is evident by analyzing the 25 elements of IT Governance mapped in the study: three elements are not affected by Contract Management; five items show evidences that they are affected by Contract Management and seventeen elements show strong evidences that they are affected by Contract Management. As a contribution to this study area, it was possible to prove that Contract Management is a key part of IT Governance for companies that operate heavily on outsourcing. For companies, implementing a process of Contract Management offers quantitative and qualitative benefits. As a contribution to the management area, the result offers as a support tool for decision making, helping the company to evaluate the impacts of the use of Contract Management in the IT Governance model. The researcher has the opportunity of publishing articles based on this study. Some of the limitations of this study are the impossibility of generalizing the results and geographic question since it was not possible to interview IT members that work in all units where the company has representation. It is recommended, as future research, to conduct a study in a company that is implementing the model of Contract Management, comparatively analyzing the IT Governance model before and after the adoption of the Contract Management practice. It is also recommended carrying out further studies so that it is possible to generalize the result obtained.