Proactive management of distributed organisational computing: Prevention always pays, doesn't it?

Organisations have eagerly adopted the new opportunities provided by distributed computing technology. These opportunities have also created new dependency on the technology and threats of technical problems. Information technology (IT) management has to choose its position towards these new technical risks. Should the problems be prevented proactively in advance or settled reactively afterwards? This paper draws conclusions from an action research case study aimed at proactive versus reactive end-user support. Between 1994 and 1997 one of the business units in Nokia Telecommunications required a new approach for its distributed information systems (IS) to facilitate rapid organisational growth. The distributed IS and its end-user support were established and organised during a 30-month re-engineering process. These results provide a new view to the dependencies between business processes and IT. The new distributed IT has become, often insidiously, a necessity for vital business processes. Therefore, risk management should be adopted as a standard tool for IS management to identify such dependencies. Proactive actions should be aimed at those areas where IT-related business risks are identified. Proactivity should be supplemented by reactive support to provide daily assistance for the end-users.