5.1 Introduction

IT management does not have an impressive reputation when it comes to fulfilling promises. Of course, IT never builds identical information systems in an identical organizational context and, therefore, IT projects always involve risks and uncertainty. These risks and uncertainty, however, decrease during the project. Unfortunately, so do the possibilities to adapt the information system to the wishes of the organization. Often, many requirements only become apparent when the information system is already in use.

The problem described above is here defined as the IT management paradox . At the beginning of a project when there are still many possibilities to change the functionality of an information system, members of the organization often insufficiently understand these possibilities and their implications. At the moment that the information system is operational and the implications become clear, substantial modifications are hardly possible.

Many techniques, such as prototyping, have been developed to resolve this problem and these work to some extent. However, incremental or spiral development techniques are always focused on delivering the best possible information system given the approved project. The important link between the identification and approval of these projects and the actual implementation and subsequent operations is, however, often missing. In other words, in many cases we are simply developing the wrong systems, or justifying proposals against incomplete analysis. Prototyping techniques have too narrow a perspective of the system life-cycle to be able to actually...