In the 20 years that I have been a management consultant, I’ve seen over a hundred IT organizations (ITOs) up close. Although I have come to see the ITO as a strategic asset to the organization, unfortunately, more often than not, the ITO has been seen as a liability by the most members of the parent enterprise. In the diversity of ITOs that I have seen, I observed that ITOs seem to evolve through a series of stages until their value to the parent enterprise is fully mature (first described in an article I wrote in 2001). The maturity model was based on my observations about the different change agenda I saw in different ITOs. In short, ITOs are either Defensive, Reactive, Responsive, or Strategy-Focused.