ABSTRACT
Ask any chief information officer (CIO) what he or she is doing to contribute to the success of the enterprise, and the CIO will respond with a list of all the strategic IT projects currently under way. However, if you were to poll that IT executive’s customers, a different line of discussion would emerge. Although some customers might well focus on the recent move to E-commerce or the introduction of an enterprise resource planning system, most would talk with great intensity about network availability, system response time, the quality of help desk personnel, and the overall reliability of the organization’s hardware and software platforms. In short, the typical corporate customer values IT as a utility: always there, always on, and as dependable as your wristwatch. Indeed, those IT organizations that are highly regarded by their parent institutions have earned this standing because of their attention to and success in day-today service delivery.
