"The business case sows the seeds for success or failure of IT-enabled investments," says Peter Harrison, who leads the value management competency within IBM. Harrison thinks organisations need a better vision for the much-maligned business case.

"There is a huge dissatisfaction with the business case approach, philosophy and practice," he says. "It's all about promising things that are rarely delivered. And that is why there is a lot of scepticism. Very few people believe business cases and it all comes back to a fundamental point: A lot of organisations don't spend enough time in the rigour up front."

Harrison cites one CIO who laconically observed that were his organisation to have banked all the business case benefits for lead time reduction, the company would be delivering goods to customers before the product was made. Rather than promising things that are rarely delivered, clued-up CIOs are spending the time to build a rigorous case based on business strategy. It's a high level conversation not traditionally associated with IT value.

"When we talk about the value of IT, we are often really talking about reducing the total cost of ownership and how we run the IT quotient -- which is a lower level conversation," Harrison says. "The conversation shouldn't be about 'IT and the business'; it should be 'IT and the other parts of the business'." It may seem like a subtle distinction, but it's an important one, and it's something that has always puzzled Grant Swinbourne, former general manager for business systems with the Jetset Travelworld Group.