Revealing the State of the Art in Managing IT Infrastructure Within Enterprises: A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract

Effective management of information technology infrastructure (ITI) is key to success for any enterprise offering IT services in this contemporary digital era. Considering the importance of the topic both for research and practice, a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) was conducted (with the following research questions) to present state-of-the-art concerning the management of ITI, (i) what focus areas related to the management of IT Infrastructure have been considered in the extant literature?, (ii) what are the publication trends and characteristics of existing research on IT Infrastructure Management?, (iii) what are the main challenges in the context of managing IT Infrastructure reported in the existing literature?, and (iv) what recommendations and guidelines have been proposed to overcome the reported challenges? Following the systematic approach, n=57 articles from extant literature satisfying this study’s inclusion and exclusion criteria were considered for analysis to find answers to these research questions. The findings reveal (i) research focus areas categorized into 6 categories (i.e., resource, service, learning style, self-care, data sharing & access, and human ITI capability), (ii) a set of variables to map publication trends and characteristics of existing research with “evaluation research”, “constructive research” and “models” recognized as the most common paper type, research methods, and contribution type respectively, (iii) 28 challenges related to ITI management in enterprises were identified, and (iv) 68 guidelines and recommendations for organizations and personnel were identified to manage the ITI more efficiently. The findings such as research focus areas and publication trends are important from a research perspective offering guidance to researchers to drive further research on the topic. Meanwhile, the challenges, recommendations, and guidelines have practical implications, providing practitioners with insights into better understanding and management of their respective ITI.

Keywords

• Challenges
• complexity
• digital services
• IT infrastructure
• security