These two facts are often ignored by organizations. Many managers express their agreement with both statements but their behavior -their preferences, their absence from key decisions, their priorities, their time allocation- send a different message. The implementation of information technology must be driven -promoted, pushed, motivated- by the organization strategies and objectives and not by the attraction of the most recent technology or management fad or by the whim of the area supervisor who wants just to automate the duties under his or her responsibility. The implementation of information technology is investment to generate wealth toward the future and not improvised expenditure to solve the routine problems of the present.
Everyone involved in either implementing or using information technology -senior executives, functional directors, operational managers, information professionals, software engineers, users, consultants, auditors, project leaders- must understand that the installation of business software, together with all computing and telecommunications hardware that surrounds it, has much more to do with dollars, profits, business processes and people than with bytes, microchips, record formats or code lines.
