“There is only governance because there is distrust. A tool to reduce the distrust limits is transparency,” said the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB) IT Superintendent Pedro Jácome de Moura Jr, during the session on IT services governance practices and management in federal universities, on the first day of the III RNP Forum. He and the Electronic Computing Center (ECC) Director of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) Édson Flávio de Souza were invited to discuss the main challenges in the area at Federal Institutions of Higher Education (Institutos Federais de Ensino Superior - IFES).

According to Pedro, an at UFPB IT Steering Committee was created, of deliberative and strategic character, which changed the status of the area within the institution from additional body to auxiliary body. “It is not easy to obtain strategic alignment without the Central Management support. Over the years, IT has always been seen as operating. The question is how to begin to be seen as strategic,” he said.

Édson Flávio de Souza, from UFPR, listed the changes that were implemented at the university. “We created a Electronic Computing Center (ECC) process of software development and a menu of services, with internal service level agreements (SLAs), clearly defined in contracts. This brought more security to both analysts and managers. We also established levels of satisfaction to know how customers are receiving the services,” Edson said, stressing the Master Plan for Information Technology (Plano Diretor de Tecnologia da Informação - PDTI) importance. “It is a way of aligning the IT vision with the larger goals of the university,” he said.

For the Center for Data Processing Director of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and Coordinator of the session Jussara Musse, out of all IFES, only 26 institutions had PDTI and 11 had the information security policy, according to a survey held by the College of IT Managers in 2014.