Every Manager's Guide to Information Technology:A Glossary of Key Terms & Concepts for Today's Business Leader
Many of the planning and accounting procedures, attitudes, and relationships in place today in organizations
In retrospect, we can identify four fairly distinct eras in the evolution of IT in organizations:
Many of today's IS management practices were created in the MIS era and are now being adapted to meet the stresses and challenges of the IIS era. A relatively small number of firms are well positioned to use IT as a business resource that can help them rethink and restructure their organizations and business operations. (I estimate that perhaps 10 percent of the Fortune 1000 are at or almost at that stage, with a slightly higher percentage of smaller firms less constrained by old management practices of managing IT. These smaller companies began their deployment of IT as a business resource with the personal computer, not with large, centralized corporate data processing units.)
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reflect a 40-year tradition of delegating information systems management and of handling IT costs and planning as budgeted overhead. The management process has not kept pace with technology-its uses and pervasive impact and the policy decisions needed to make it effective. As a result, professionals and business managers face one another across a gulf of unfamiliar language and culture and frequently experience mutual frustration trying to bridge it. A shared language helps, but more important it is a shared understanding of the issues that underlie the decisions. To merely define integration and architecture, for example, gives little insight into what these elements mean for the planning process or business managers' contributions to it.
