For those who believe in the myth of the sacrosanct "IT Annual Plan," remember it's just that -- a myth. In the real world demand is coming in every single day, so the challenge is to capture that demand, both planned and unplanned, as early as possible, expose the high-level business justification and set up an ongoing dialogue between IT and its customers. This enables the management of a demand pipeline. An opportunity analysis on this pipeline, based on an appropriate scoring model, will give rise to an initial screening and validation process which will enable an idea to move down to next stage and become a project request. Typical examples of filtering criteria for a scoring model are expected revenue, expected cost reduction, regulatory compliance or operational improvements.

Excerpted from IT Success: Towards a New Model for Information Technology by Michael Gentle (John Wiley & Sons, October 2007), $US35.00.

Michael Gentle has over 25 years of experience in IT departments, consulting companies and software vendors in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. He has a degree in mechanical engineering, with further stints in aerospace and computer science. He is also the author of The CRM Project Management Handbook.