Adopting an IT operating model can help forge a more productive relationship with the business.

Keeping track of an entire organization's IT spending and usage is a daunting prospect. However, it is fast becoming necessary - according to consultant Peter Ryan, your organization could be wasting a good deal of money on IT spending and this waste cannot reliably be detected without a unified IT operating model.

Ryan says many IT departments today are riddled with inefficiencies, lacking communications and any coherent ordering of priorities. An operating model can provide a unified view of all the organization's IT components, including processes, human resources and supporting tools.

Ryan, a partner at Deloitte with 17 years of consulting experience, has helped organizations throughout Australia and the rest of the world adopt an IT operating model, including one large organization with an IT department larger than many Australian businesses. He says such models examine IT from an entrepreneurial perspective.

"At a macro level, it's all about the business of IT," he says. "You could call it a business model - it just happens to be for an IT-capable unit within an organization. Right now if you go to virtually any business person, they'll say: 'Well, I sent something off to IT, and haven't seen it for months. I don't know if they're working on it, I don't know where it is in their priority stack'." Adopting an IT operating model can help business units and IT departments agree on a prioritization system that suits everybody.

Businesses without such a model can face the same communication problems when it comes to the budget. Within a business, Ryan says, "everybody thinks IT is a huge black box that they just pour cash into. They don't know what the spend is, they don't know how that spend is being applied, there's no real dashboard view of the activities that are going on."