A Common view on IT within an organisation is that of a provider of services to business in support of business activities. Coupled to this there is an increasing awareness that IT too should comply with regulatory controls and measures much the same way that business is currently being regulated. As a result the gap between business and IT process is narrowing.

A professionally run IT practice within an organisation would have at some point packaged their IT service offering into a range of products and positioned this package with a functional specification in a business revenue as well as associated IT cost. In practice this equates to identifying business activities and generating an optimised process against each activity.

With the ever increasing number of stringent regulatory requirements, business has been forced to identify, describe and detail each business process and procedure and demonstrate adherence to these products. Once done, business that needs to maintain the accuracy of these process descriptions as well as proof of compliance there to so that they can pass audits by regulatory authorities.

To this end these are a number of initiatives underway within the industry to address this mapping of processes within IT and business. All leading IT software vendors are focused to their competency areas in either IT or Business; the best strategy forward is to marry these two initiatives into a single service offering.