IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

9.1. The business challenge

There are enormous business challenges to be overcome at all levels – CEO, CFO, VPs, directors – for a new model of this nature to work, because it is essentially saying that everything which we originally thought was true for IT and represented fundamental business practice – if not plain common sense – was really not so at all and now needs to be turned on its head. Sacred cows like sign-offs, committed costs and schedules will now fly out of the window, to be replaced by the reality that they are all moving targets. What used to be 'free' now needs to be priced in order to regulate demand. Decibel management and executive influence for launching new projects will need to be significantly reduced through governance, in order to manage demand and approvals objectively.

For the CFO in particular, accepting that financing IT is not the same as financing plant, property and equipment is probably going to be the biggest challenge, because it goes to the heart of her role as custodian of the company's finances, which is to only give out money in return for a contractual ROI. We're now going to ask her to forget about ROI in the traditional sense of the term and to take on the role of a venture capitalist who manages a risk–reward equation rather than a cost–schedule equation. We will no longer expect her to ask in investment committees or project review boards 'Are we still on budget and schedule?' (which implicitly assumes a valid and unchangeable business ...