Strategic IT planning: assessing the options - handling rapid changes in IT systems and availability

This paper is about the fact that those organisations that have made quick fixes to cope with rapid change are likely to face increasing difficulty as the Australian Goods and Services Tax (GST) and other legislation changes over time. Past examples of the need to address acute and transitional changes gracefully and without affecting productivity are the Year-2000 (Y2K) problem, 8-digit telephone numbers, Eurodollar, etc. We need to formally manage all the requirements throughout the life of software to build or re-architect systems for ongoing change with technology-independent designs, rather than implement quick-and-dirty fixes. Such robust architectures can be achieved through applying world-class software development practices and processes.