Introduction

When speaking of IT functions, two distinct ones come to mind: the day-to-day operations and maintenance (what I will refer to as O&M) and projects. O&M, as the name implies, deals with maintaining all of the IT services available, keeping things running, and dealing with the request for changes that are raised by the different users of the IT systems, whether these are purely internal and within the company organization or external customers. Projects, as implied by the name, refer to new deployments of IT services in the form of systems, applications, and infrastructure. A CIO is expected to handle both and to know a bit of everything: software, processes, user change management, servers, networking, programming, etc., and he is also expected to know how to handle operations and handle projects.