Toward an Ontology of ICT Management: Integration of Organizational Theories and ICT Core Constructs

As an emergent field of research and practice, the management of information and communication technologies (ICT) offers complex challenges, such as how to structure and organize the accumulated body of knowledge as well as the need to orchestrate and encapsulate theoretical perspectives and methodologies. As in any emergent field, the ICT management (ICTM) body of knowledge has mostly expanded through diverse theoretical lenses. It also has to overcome concept redundancy and ambiguity in order to gain insights that are more than “old wine in new bottles.” In this chapter, we focus on two main issues. First, we strive to achieve a holistic perspective of ICTM. Second, we explore the way in which organizational theories can contribute to a better understanding of this holistic perspective. For this, we introduce an ontology that describes four ICTM core constructs—policy, project, assets, and evaluation—and their interrelationships. We discuss each one of these constructs in light of six common organizational theories.