Top management toolbox for managing corporate IT

process involving such activities as identifying promising application targets, deciding the application’s posture (defensive or offensive) and mode of use (internal or external), and assessing the application’s associated risk of system failure and financial loss. One practical conclusion for strategic systems is that planning for them is intertwined with an organization’s business strategy, so cooperation between IS managers and non-IS managers is critical for their implementation. In many organizations, general and functional managers—with law, finance, accounting, marketing, or even engineering backgrounds—are not familiar with the latest technology. This raises a barrier to communication that limits their ability to determine risk before deciding whether to go ahead with a project or how to control large projects during their development life cycles. Two examples illustrate how it can lead to disastrous results: Bank of America. Development of a system to support the bank’s management of trust accounts was budgeted at $25 million and scheduled to take two years to complete. The result was to be the MasterNet system, with online updating and automated generation of monthly statements. Instead, completion took five years at a total cost of $80 million— and was still rejected by its target users because it created accounting problems and suffered from slow response times and communication and disk drive problems. Many of the bank’s employees were laid off during development, and the bank’s reputation was severely damaged. Some major banking customers even lost confidence in the bank; the total number of institutional accounts dropped from 800 to 700, and assets under management shrank from $38 billion to $34 billion [1, 2]. In 1995, seven years after the project’s failure, the bank’s management sold its institutional trusts and securities services division, which still needed a major technology investment to position itself to compete against the enormous institutions that dominate the field of institutional trust banking. However, because of the bank’s flawed history in implementing technology to support corporate trust businesses, the bank’s executives decided it