Maximising the business impact of IT: importance of managing the total business experience

Information technology (IT) plays a crucial role in the running of most businesses and yet the success rates associated with IT investment are unsatisfactory. This is borne out by personal experience, regular surveys and in the literature suggesting that the current IT delivery model is incomplete or inadequate in some way. Given the nature of the current IT delivery model it is likely to be even less successful in the future as emerging and future technologies place new demands upon businesses and IT service providers. The research question asks what constitutes a new IT delivery model that can make successful business outcomes more likely both now and in the future.
The research design was required to develop insight into what is known to be a complex, persistently problematic, and non-obvious phenomenon in a business-critical practitioner area that has been yielding very low rates of success for many years. The qualitative research was a large scale project using cross case primary data comprised of field notes from conversations with senior managers in some very large global enterprises where IT support to the business had to be improved. Grounded theory was used and a theoretical model, the business and IT relationship model, emerged where the total business experience was of central importance. The model has been found to have heuristic, deterministic, and controlling characteristics, but further research revealed that although a logically correct frame of reference for describing the relationship it doesn’t reflect behaviour in all cases. The research has shown that this can give rise to significant business and IT management problems.
The proposed future delivery model, active management, is an over-arching management framework based upon the observed relationship and a managed business experience. It is explained how this can provide an improved basis for the assessment, alignment, management and governance of IT. Active management is technology agnostic and is shown to be valid in the context of current practice, emerging technologies and future scenarios.