Trust and Partnership: Strategic IT Management for Turbulent Times

CHAPTER 16

What Should Be Done?

The broad questions now are:

1. Now what?
2. What needs to be done?
3. Who needs to do it?

The answers, of course, depend on the specifics of the enterprise and the current conditions of the enterprise IT capabilities throughout the enterprise. We offer here a multistep approach to assessing those specific and conditions, all pointed toward achieving the basic goals of Strategic IT Management.

Two points to get started. First, significant overlap occurs among within the tools and assessments suggested in the following. Each reader will need to determine those that are most helpful. Second, we consistently emphasize that Strategic IT Management is not about the technical details for managing IT nor, for that matter, managing business. Rather, it is the crucial piece of fitting business and IT together, in partnership, to achieve the common goals of value from IT and response to turbulence and uncertainty.

But why are we taking this trip? The question applies not only to Chapter 16 but also to the discussion of the self-assessments described in the Part IV Introduction. After all, the reader might exclaim, we certainly know our own enterprise! And, more to the point, we’ll be told what to do by senior leadership. And is all this too simplistic? Our enterprise is an organic, complicated thing. Yet our experience has been that most managers and professionals really haven’t considered the specifics of the organizations for which they work. This probably is ...