IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

What this book is

This book identifies the fundamental reasons why, despite the enormous technological progress in computers over the past 50 years, most IT departments remain unsuccessful, where success is defined as the ability to deliver reliable solutions in acceptable time frames, at acceptable costs and with clear business benefits.

Most books which try to explain this situation focus on one or more of the usual suspects like project management, governance or best-practice methodologies. As laudable and necessary as most of these topics may be, they don't address the root causes of the problem. In other words, you can score full marks on any of these components, e.g. have excellent project management and level 3 certification in the CMMi methodology, but still be unsuccessful in the overall scheme of things.

This book therefore takes a step back and challenges the fundamental model under which IT operates, which likens building software to the construction industry, with the IT department the equivalent of a contractor who is supposed to deliver systems on schedule, within budget and to spec. As we all know, this rarely happens, yet this premise drives the whole way that IT departments have been operating from the beginning, with an over-emphasis on contractual obligations and compliance rather than on the actual delivery of workable results.

This book proposes an alternative model by walking through the end-to-end processes of an IT department, covering subjects like demand ...