Trust and Partnership: Strategic IT Management for Turbulent Times

PREFACE

We began this book with the goal of describing information technology (IT) and business¹ solutions to turbulence and uncertainty, while at the same time finding solutions to the weak relationships and frequent mistrust that exists between IT organizations and their business “partners.” We presumed these problems were rooted with the IT management and its governance processes; therefore, our Strategic IT Management solution would be better IT processes and organizational structure. Examples of these “better” processes include strategic IT planning, scenario planning, portfolio management, project development, and operational excellence, all of which we discuss in Part III. We characterize them as basic competencies every enterprise needs in order to cope successfully with turbulence and uncertainty. However, this is an overly IT-centric and very mechanistic view of the problems and their solutions.

As we worked through the book, we realized that the lack of trust and ineffective business–IT partnerships—together with systemic turbulence and uncertainty—are really the fundamental problems. These must be understood before we can begin to discuss how to improve the management and governance processes. Consequently, we describe (and justify the need for) a set of Strategic IT Management capabilities as building blocks for partnership and trust as well as a means to provide solutions for turbulence and uncertainty. We thought we had zeroed in on our target. However, the road ...