Abstract:

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic causing a health crisis that has affected all the fields of activity around the world.

Since then, all organizations including higher education institutions (HEIs), are facing the challenge of improving their strategy, ensuring the success of their mission and achieving their goals. Therefore, leaders of these institutions are trying to identify adequate solutions for maintaining remotely pedagogical continuity.
HEIs need visionary leaders to inspire people to achieve their mission and vision. As well as good managers to make sure that their teams are in line with the institution’s goals.

The issue of leadership and management has received increasing attention from academics and has become a key strategy for building the capacity of an efficient organization. Establishing a leadership and management style in times of crisis remains a great challenge which requires significant human, financial and material resources. Material resources and particularly information and communication technologies ICTs constitute a very important resource to manage. The emergence of various platforms, tools and teaching methods constrained leaders and managers to work hard to deploy the most appropriate tools for emergency remote education.

The university leadership team must ensure that an adequate infrastructure is setup so that the teaching and learning process can be carried out effectively. It must also lead a deeper reflection on the quality of the services offered to the various stakeholders.

Our contribution is a part of quality approach based on clear communication of services management, processes and responsibilities. We will first present the results of a qualitative study carried out among teachers, administrators and students of a Moroccan public university. The analysis of the data gathered allowed us to identify the barriers and opportunities for setting up remote pedagogical processes. In this context, IT service management approach based on ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) best practices is proposed. The aim of this approach is to optimize resources and improve the quality of available IT services and to make service catalogs and service agreement available to the various users. It will offer them a common language and practices and serve as a basis for leaders to structure and improve the quality and efficiency of services provision.

Keywords:

Leadership, management, university, crisis, uncertain time, ITIL, IT service management, Service Catalog.