IT has been alive and well in most businesses and organizations since the late 1960s or early 1970s. Before that IT tended to be something of an esoteric technology for use by universities and large government organizations.

Throughout IT s business history it has gone through a number of stages of contribution to the business world notably: the stage of automation, in which repetitive tasks were computerized; the stage of information, in which automated processes were used to provide improved ways of doing business; and the stage of transformation, in which information technology provides the foundation for doing business in a totally new way (Zuboff, 1988). Of course all three stages still exist in many companies while some companies have yet to progress beyond stage one.

And in spite of this thirty year history, a feature that doesn t seem to have changed in many cases is the way in which IT sees its role within the organization or the way in which IT operates. They still think their role is to build and support the technologies for their business to use.

A major turning point in IT s relationship with their supporting organizations came as Birchall and Lyons (1995) identified in about the mid-1980s. This was when PCs started to gain general acceptance as a business tool and when business people started to source their information technologies directly from the supplier. In-house IT departments generally treated the PC as a desktop office automation device or as a glorified dumb...