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Microsoft Windows’ 95 did cost Microsoft hundreds of millions of dollars on development. These costs are mainly made up of labour costs. On top of this Microsoft was granted one billion in subsidy for developing the product. This subsidy was given in the shape of free testing. 400,000 beta versions were distributed. The test results of 300,000 users were received. Each of these users tested over several months. What did the customers get in return for this? No money but a product that was much more stable ().

Functional managers work on the functional side of the application of IT. They target what application of IT offers. They often started their career as an employee at a service desk or as a functional tester. Next, they progressed through functional designer into information analyst. For an organization to enable such progress it requires, amongst other things, to have career management in place and having a clear idea of the competencies of the employee within the organization.

The increased pressure on IT facilities with regard to usage, forces organizations to keep a record of the use of IT objects. Since the arrival of personal computers, we all know about software licences. For every pc that has a word processing programme installed on it, there should be a licence for this word processing programme. The nineties saw the rise of software licences for larger servers, which were priced according to the maximum number of users able to use the software at the same time. The year 2004 saw the advent of utility computing, a form of computing where one only pays for the use of hardware when this is actually used. Keeping a record of the use of objects prevents over-licensing, makes it possible to prove legal use and saves costs because of its transparency. Bout a quart of all European requests in some European countries for proposals over the 1999–2002 period are tenders concerning IT facilities. This extreme representation of IT is on the one hand caused by procurements for solving the year 2000 problem and on the other hand, the IT sector is a sector in which one watches carefully whether authorities comply with the European regulations.

Our contract is worked out according to the combination of products and services in 60 Service Level Agreements (SLA’s). Together with the customer, we have drawn up a quality plan per service level agreement. We have a meeting every fortnight with the employees that are involved in the realization of the SLA and quality plan. We all look at the same measuring data concerning our products and services. We know the availability, the elapsed times of changes, the response and we all aim at improving these ().

With the increasing impact of IT care for continuity, confidentiality and reliability of data processing also become statutory. For instance, the police have to comply with the security requirements they have set. The Superintendant performs annually an audit to see to what extent his force complies with these. The ING bank implements internally the guidelines of the ISO 17799 standard for Information security and attaches a Trusted Internal Party state to parts of the organization.

For supporting customer relationship management we all chose the Siebel package and we still ended up with three different implementations in our organization. Set-up of a CRM competence centre would have prevented this. In that case we would have been able to support the divisions at an early stage. We would just have bought those licences for modules that are really necessary. We would not have become entangled in tailor made modules for functions, that in a release two years on are delivered as standard. Fortunately, the further evolution of technology, in this case the transition of the client-server version to the browser-based version makes this problem open to this discussion.

In the age of the steam engine (1840), the activities that made use of the energy of this engine were placed close to this engine for reasons of efficiency. The layout of a plant was determined by the source of power. That all changed with the rise of electricity (1880). This meant that activities could be grouped together in such a manner one achieved an optimal flow of goods through the production process. It took a few decades before this new source of power was optimally used. In the year 2004 the networks enable us to think about an optimal positioning of IT tasks. What will this lead to?