Years ago a colleague expressed frustration about the organization’s senior management not permitting the start of more IT projects. “Those executives need to learn more about IT,” he said.
In that moment, I believed what he said. After all, this was in the mid 1990s when IT departments could easily advance projects for the sake of technology alone.
IT wanted to implement new servers, new services, faster networks. Did the business *need* them? IT never thought about that. Instead, IT was thinking about its own desires, wanting to “stay current” with technologies, with never a thought as to whether these new things were needed or would improve the business in any measurable way.
The *real* problem was that IT knew too little about the business that it was supporting. IT is a service provider for the business, not the other way around. IT is supposed to support strategic and tactical business processes, not make work for itself by implementing the latest way-cool technology for its own sake.
IT does not drive business objectives, but instead supports them.
Peter H. Gregory 