Overview

When we first thought about Chapter 5 and how to start it in a manner that would drive home the significance of the information we planned to cover, we immediately thought of a quote that until now we had been incorrectly attributing to General George Patton, People who fail to plan, plan to fail. We offer our apologies to Stewart Turcotte, the owner of those words.

The author Gustav Metzman once said, Most business men generally are so busy coping with immediate and piecemeal matters that there is a lamentable tendency to let the long run or future take care of itself. We often are so busy putting out fires, so to speak, that we find it difficult to do the planning that would prevent those fires from occurring in the first place. As a prominent educator has expressed it, Americans generally spend so much time on things that are urgent that we have none left to spend on those that are important. When we ran across this quote, we immediately knew it was the right one to use here. The words business men can easily be replaced with IT professionals, and in doing so sum up the existence of most IT professionals and articulates why COBIT identified planning and organization as one of their domains. As part of daily life within IT organizations, fires tend to get the highest priority, and unfortunately, the areas in which IT can really add value to a company, such as...