We have recently encountered troubled CIOs and IT organizations with common symptoms. These symptoms characterize the uneasy relationship between IT and the rest of the business. As one CIO put it: "my business users do not understand what we do, and worse, do not value what we accomplish for them." As a result, the business users complain loudly about IT in general and about the high costs of IT in particular -- and this is never good.
IT organizations in trouble have the following symptoms in common: