TABLE OF CONTENTS I was having a report-back session to the CEO of a large steel foundry group. His company had outsourced their IT function some years previously, and was paying some $30 million per annum for their IT to be provided by a specialist IT company. There s nothing wrong with that. Except when I reported that his group IT function was spending 76 percent of its time dealing with technology and operational issues, he hit the roof! Why , he asked me, if I am spending $30 million per annum on outsourcing, are my IT people doing their jobs for them? His view, which has some validity, was that if the work of maintaining his business momentum was background work, then it was the role of the expensive outsource company to do it. He acknowledged that there would need to be some guidance from his IT people, but that should constitute 10 percent of his group IT function s activity and no more than 20 percent of his regional IT function s time.
He then drew a picture for me, turning my graphical representation of IT s roles on its side. His picture was useful, and I have continued to use it ever since.
Figure 3.1 shows what my original IT role description looked like. Figure 3.2 shows what his sideways picture looked like.
While this says nothing of the performance of the...
