Alexander N. Biryukov - Associate Professor, Department of Business Informatics, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation
Address: 49, Leningradskiy Prospect, Moscow, 125993, Russian Federation  
E-mail: anbiryukov@fa.ru

      This paper describes a new approach to strategic management in IT departments as compared with the existing approach, traditionally based on the development of an IT strategy aligned with the enterprise’s business strategy. The proposed method assumes gaining greater trust from the business to be the principal goal of an IT department. Meanwhile, all the other goals are treated as implications of the trust, because none of them can be achieved if the IT department is not considered a trusted partner by the business management. Trust in the IT department is an aggregate of individual trust exhibited by its customers, some of which are interrelated and mutually affect their opinions. To obtain maximal personal trust, the IT department should apply an individual approach to each of its customers. In terms of IT Service Management (ITSM), this means that an individual Service Level Agreement (SLA) should be designed and used with respect to each customer. As a result, the IT Department will be able to gain the maximal integral trust. The IT Department can benefit from the acquired trust for different purposes. For example, the IT Department can use the increasing customer trust to justify modifications of SLA conditions so as to reduce IT costs without affecting the customer. Another way is using the integral trust to guarantee support of the corporate management when the IT Department starts some innovative undertaking in its own field. In the conclusion, it is shown that the problem of maximizing integral trust is not easier than the well-known knapsack problem.