IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

8.1. Players, roles and responsibilities – the business

The end-to-end processes covering supply, demand and production are shown in Figure 8.1. The roles and responsibilities across these phases are shown in Figures 8.2 and 8.3, which we will now explain. Needless to say, what follows is not an absolute, but simply a framework for the fundamental roles and responsibilities which companies can use as a foundation to implement the new model. In the real world, there can be variations across companies, sectors and countries.

8.1.1. Business units

These are the internal clients who need to solve a business problem using information technology. Roles and responsibilities will vary across the demand, supply and production phases.

• DEMAND PHASE: See Figure 8.2. The capture of demand in the form of ideas into a pipeline will be the responsibility of a departmental manager or key user of an application, called the application manager. Without this role, existing application users or people requesting new projects would be free to ask for anything and everything, from the frivolous to the serious. All of this would then subsequently need to be evaluated, resulting in both IT and the business spending a lot more time than is really necessary. The 'application manager' will meet on a regular basis with the 'IT client manager' (defined further on) to jointly review demand, not just what's in the pipeline and the status of ongoing work, but also what might be coming down the line in the near ...