Full life-cycle management and the IT Management paradox

In this Chapter the concept of full life-cycle management is described. Full life-cycle management is a series of notions and techniques, which are essential to maintain control over the information function in an organisation. Furthermore, a survey is described providing an overview of the extent to which the elements of full life-cycle management are actually applied in practice. This Chapter illustrates that IT Management is still an underdeveloped area, both in theory and in practice. Many suggestions for improvements are given on the basis of the concept of full life-cycle management. 1I ntroduction 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 organisational 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 organisation. 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 organisation 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 focussed 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 a too narrow perspective of the system lifecycle to be able to actually resolve the IT management paradox. The fact that this is often the case can be illustrated with how cost/benefit analysis is regularly used. In practice, costs often only include development costs. Sometimes costs are even limited to the costs of developing the hardware and software of the information system. Development costs typically include 20%-40% of the life-cycle costs of an information system (most costs are incurred in the operational stage of the information system). Hardware and software development costs typically include 5%-10% of the life-cycle costs of an information system.