Chapter 9
Developing an IT Strategy
Fred “Firefighter” Forsyth has been leading the IT organization for his online commerce company for the past five years. Fred's company provides e-commerce sites for organizations that cannot afford to build their own sites and depends heavily on IT to support its customers. His team works very long hours and has gotten into a pattern of saving the day when users experience issues with the company's systems.
Fred does not have time to develop a long-term IT strategy, and since the company does not have a well-articulated business strategy, he has never spent much time in this area. His boss has raised systems reliability issues and customer complaints several times, and Fred has countered that more money is needed for IT and these problems will go away. Fred does consider his team very good at responding to issues and earned his nickname, “Firefighter,” based on the countless times his staff members have had to respond to emergencies. He rewards his team for their rapid responses to these issues and feels his company has developed a greater appreciation for his team's abilities after the countless times they have responded to systems outages.
Fred rolled into the office on Friday around 10 AM after spending most of the night dealing with a recurring network issue that prevented customers from accessing their systems. His boss called him into his office. Fred expected a hero's welcome for resolving the network issue and wondered if ...
