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Top1. Introduction
Public sector organizations financed by public resources exist to achieve outcomes that benefit the society (Baporikar & Randa, 2020). According to Ishola & Olusoji (2020), services promote the growth of organizations, driven by the dynamic nature of information and communication technologies. Service organizations today are engaging in continuous search of strategies to improve their service performance as well as deliver excellence customer-centric services (Ibrahim et al., 2018), since, the main function of the government sector is to provide services to the public based on the needs of the people (Galli, 2020). For this reason, many medium- and large-sized organizations have areas or departments dedicated to Information Technology (IT), which provide assistance to other departments of the organization in technological aspects. Each request made to an IT department is framed within an IT service (ITS), as an ITS uses IT in order to enable and optimize the organization's business processes (Pilorget & Schell, 2018). ITS Management (ITSM) is a process-based approach which serves to strategically manage ITS throughout their life cycle (Trusson et al., 2014), involving the delivery and support of technology, applications, information, and training within an organization. Therefore, following ISTM guidelines provides organizations with greater chances of success in the activities carried out by their IT departments at the service management level.
One of the recommended practices in ITSM is the implementation of a catalog of information technology services (ITSC), which should be considered as a knowledge management system and which provides information about ITS to clients and service providers (Schorr & Hvam, 2018), containing specifications of all the ITS that the organization needs to function properly (Hunnebeck, 2011).
The implementation of an ITSC is a recommended practice to develop a correct ITSM; however, it has been statistically demonstrated that there are low levels of ITSC implementation in many organizations. For example, in a study by Marrone et al. (2014), the levels of adoption of some processes of the ITSM defined in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) were examined, based on a survey applied in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and in countries that speak German. One of the processes addressed was the ITSC, specifically regarding the management of the ITSC (ITSCM), where it was demonstrated that the adoption of the ITSCM only began starting with ITIL v3; however, the average adoption of this process in the countries studied was barely 23.6%, a fairly low percentage (Marrone et al., 2014). Another study was carried out on the ITIL processes applied in organizations in countries such as Spain, Ecuador, Chile, Luxembourg, Colombia, Norway, Venezuela, and El Salvador, based on 40 surveys. It was evident that only 17.5% of the participants stated that they worked with ITSCM; again, a fairly low percentage (Lema et al., 2015).
In 2017, Iden and Eikebrokk published a study on the adoption of ITSM in Nordic countries (i.e., Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway) based on 836 surveys, which detailed important results around ITSC implementation levels and showed interesting data; for example, the average level of adoption of ITSCM in the public sector was substantially lower than in the private sector (21.9% versus 26.4%) and, in general, the level of adoption of ITSCM in all types of organizations hardly changed from 2010 to 2014 (Iden & Eikebrokk, 2017).
These results are in addition to a recent study applied to institutions in the Republic of Ecuador where, based on a survey applied to 45 IT professionals working in 22 public institutions, it was evident that only 7% of respondents stated that they had fully implemented ITSC and 22% reported having it partially implemented (Mera et al., 2018). In this investigation, it was also determined that two of the most important factors for the absence of an ITSC were ignorance of the subject and the regulations allowing its correct construction and subsequent management.