It's a win when IT delivers value to the company. Instead of doing consistent transactions day in and day out, technology is bringing new systems in all the time. You're managing change all the time. You have to know how commit resources and set deadlines and know when perfect is too costly.
Cooper points out that most jobs offer the luxury of doing the same task over and over.
If you change a process, you do a pilot, then implement it in department after department. Most of the things we do, we won't revisit for seven or eight years. That makes it a lot tougher to get it right. As IT has grown in importance, so has the need to get it right the first time. Cooper says that typical projects five years ago might have cost a big company several hundred thousand dollars.