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Our bank is in actual fact an information factory. Without the use of IT, our services would come to a dead halt. This really goes for all our services but in particular for Direct Banking. It is therefore not surprising that the status of our three most import product innovations and the status of the exploitation of IT are high on our weekly management agenda.

Functional and performance requirements can be made at different levels in an organization. Functional requirements are often made because we cannot process large quantities manually if we want to achieve certain elapsed times or because we are never able to get information that quickly. This is one of the reasons why we invest in IT support. This requires choosing infrastructures and applications. That is how we came to work with personal productivity tools. That is how our business processes happen to be supported by SAP these days and also how we got an internet channel. We demand our IT to be adaptable, we need it 24 hours a day/7 days a week and the costs have to be calculable.

Recognizing supply and demand-side results in the supply focusing on the demand and therefore a more customer-oriented operation. Customers demand transparency. This requires a logical chain of activities that are carried out to fulfil the demand. This means the rise of process-focussed operating. This is how attention to workflow control comes about and is the start of the application of general logistics models for providing IT services.

Over the last few years, our organization has entered into partnerships with companies in China and Poland. They want insight into our sales and we want the same into the status of our orders with them. That results in functional demands on the information function, which may only be filled in step by step. In a chain, companies that cooperate for a number of years should really exchange data openly and transparently. With our information function and its IT support that is not always as easy as all that.

As Siebel application managers over the last five years we had to deal with the switch from client server technology to more browser-based applications. And at the same time we experienced the consequences of the trend for changing from paying for licences per user of an IT facility to arrive at paying for use of the application alone, the so-called utility computing. These changes both led to a different life cycle for many of our products and to considering the furnished management tools. Configuration management, security management, availability management and cost management are all subjects we’ll have to address explicitly in future.

Introduction of ITIL led to structuring of exploitation tasks. This enables measuring at processes, which after a while can result in actions to improve of the quality of these processes. Next, it became possible to take the customer’s priorities more into account. For instance within the Imtech company introduction of ITIL provided structure and overview. So it was possible to process more calls and one was able to work more in conformity with the priorities as set by the customer. The customer satisfaction improved because the supply-side met the agreements to such an extent that it really fitted in with the organization’s strategy.

Pay per view is in this case the same as pay for use: IT organizations are organized in such a way, they are able to respond flexibly to the demand. IBM calls this on demand computing, HP speaks of the adaptive enterprise, Microsoft talks about the dynamic systems initiative and Gartners’ term is the real time infrastructure. It all boils down to the deliberate structuring of the IT tasks in organizations in such a manner that it is possible to change capacity flexibly in IT facilities; one runs relatively little risk of the facilities being too expensive or that they do not work. The predicted result: in 2006 there will be 30% less money to be spent on facilities as comparable to 2004.

At our company Oracle, without IT the glue would be missing from our organization. Without this glue there would be no more exchange of information. Nobody would have access to stock, customer or order data. Failing IT services are disastrous. We therefore control IT on the quality of the operational processes and the number of successful implementations. Our boss Larry Ellison performs this control ().

Functional and performance requirements relate to the product to be delivered and the services to be furnished with it. Service level agreements deal with both. These also indicate which process one can go through, in case one has queries about a product or service.

Ordina uses offshore sourcing for developing and maintaining software. To this purpose, it went into partnership with a company from India. For labour-intensive services that are not tied to one location, there is free choice with regard to location. Criteria are in that case knowledge and skill, the cost of labour etc.