Information Systems (IS) were first developed to obtain cost savings by automating clerical work. Today, they are used to provide new products and services, to support and enhance the processes by which managers and professionals make decisions and to coordinate work within and across organisations. The application of information technology (IT), which accounts for a large percentage of capital investments that organisations make, has led to entirely new ways of doing business.
Traditionally, the responsibility for managing the acquisition and use of IT in organisations was explicitly assigned to functional IS managers. Today, with the dispersal of IT and its increasing importance throughout the organisation, most of this responsibility is devolving to line managers who are generally ill-prepared to accept it. Consequently, managing information technology has become both increasingly important and increasingly difficult.