The Business-Oriented CIO: A Guide to Market-Driven Management

Chapter 3. IT Strategy and Planning

All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.

—Sun Tzu

Always plan ahead. It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.

—Richard C. Cushing

In 1830, Charles Lyell published his Principles of Geology and changed forever the way science looked at the world. Before Lyell, the prevailing view held by geologists was known as catastrophism—everything in the world (rocks, mountains, rivers, seas, and living creatures) was created as the result of one single catastrophic event. All change stopped after the catastrophe was over, with the earth remaining unchanged ever since. No new mountains, no new rivers, no new creatures.

Lyell was a uniformitarian. He believed that geologic forces, working over very long periods of time, had radically altered the surface of the earth. Moreover, these powerful, slow-moving, yet constant forces continue to change the world to this day. Twenty-nine years later, Charles Darwin, in his On the Origin of Species, would use Lyell's theory to say that if the earth changes, then, to survive, the life the earth supports must also change. Science learned in the first half of the nineteenth century that change is everywhere and inevitable. The business world did not learn it for another 120 years.

THE PROBLEM

Throughout the early post–World War II period, business in the United States boomed. The demand for goods was so high that businesses had to do little to sell ...