IT Portfolio Management Step-by-Step: Unlocking the Business Value of Technology

3.3. THE NEW FOCUS FOR IT: BUSINESS

Historical Perspective

It used to be so simple when IT was a staff function—a cost center that served primarily as a support-based entity. In the early days, IT was called data processing. Rudimentary information technologies introduced in the late 1940s were expensive and limited in functionality. In fact, the technology was so expensive that a conscious decision to have two–digit date fields was made to save two bytes of memory even though it was known that it would be problematic at the turn of the century. The core purpose of computing in business was to perform massive amounts of calculations, primarily tabulations. In government, computers were leveraged to enable basic calculations such as census tabulations with greater speed and accuracy. In the private sector, computers were leveraged in accounting departments, primarily to improve the speed and accuracy of bookkeeping. The introduction of computing hardware virtualized and commoditized calculation and tabulation, displacing the clerks in green visors.

As IT evolved with the emergence of second- and third-generation languages, the utility of the hardware expanded. Computers enabled decision support with advances in memory, storage, and processing capabilities as well as software. The distinction between data and information surfaced. Data equated to records; information equated to reports or processed records. Thus, the management information systems (MIS) department was born. The ...