The following is excerpted from There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project: A Handbook for Intentional Business Change.
To succeed in the digital age, IT projects must be redefined to deliver business change instead of just information technology deliverables. But beneath this lies a more fundamental shift: IT operations should be just as embedded in business operations as IT applications should be embedded in achieving business change.
In many organizations, IT is run as if it were a separate business – a service provider for its internal customers. Unfortunately, doing so creates dysfunction for both the applications and operations sides of the IT house.
Part of this is because the IT-as-a-business metaphor has led to a strange practice: negotiated service level agreements (SLAs) between IT operations and its internal customers.