A Well-Founded Framework for Assessing IT-Systems by The Suriname Ministry of Finance

Abstract

The government of Suriname, like any other government of development countries, copes with a number of limitations. Among others, the government lacks of IT policies and IT awareness. The challenge for the Suriname government, and therefore the Ministry of Finance, is to obtain means by which IT policy and IT decisions are steered in a structured way. The main interest should be the acquisition of business and IT integration and the ability to control strategic changes within the organization. The Generic System Development Process (GSDP)s is a relatively new approach on the development of systems. It focuses on business and organizational aspects of an organization as well as on the design and engineering process of developing target systems. In addition, the GSDP provides a sound definition for relevant aspects of the complete development process and an overview of relations between these aspects. The objective of thesis project is to develop a well-founded framework for assessing IT systems by the Suriname Ministry of Finance. The result is an assessment framework based on the Generic System Development Process. The assessment framework consists of an ontological and implementation model of the organization and a functional model of existing IT systems. The Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) is used for implementing the ontological model. The theoretical foundation of this methodology is used for defining tables for expressing the implementation model of the organization and the functional model of existing IT systems. The functional model consists of consistency tables, which contains integrated information of an organization and the supporting IT system. These tables open discussion and form the base for a proper assessment of existing IT systems.