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Preface

Drastic reduction of IT budgets, even more so in this time
of economic crisis, signifies a lack of understanding as to IT’s
strategic contribution to business. This perception is
changing with the success of newcomers that are acting with
modern IT infrastructures such as Dell, Amazon, Google,
Facebook, etc. It is also changing because the restrictions of
legacy IT architecture are becoming too much to cope with,
faced with the requirements of information traceability,
essential for mastering risks in modern and complex
organizations.
Poor knowledge of and lack of auditability of data,
business rules and processes block business users’
understanding of IT, which reduces the strategic interest
that they should have for it. In a world where IT has a key
role in the execution of processes and in the exchange of
information, a company that gives up faced with this opacity
takes a considerable operational risk, that of the loss of
control over its activity. To avoid this, new methods and
techniques exist in order to progressively transform IT
systems and improve their transparency.

This change of direction runs deep. An information
system, handicapped by a rigid IT, can liberate itself from it.
A new IT pact is born from this transformation approach. It
places the true value of the information system outside