IT-enabled sense-and-respond strategies in complex public organizations

City governments face difficult challenges in serving their increasingly Net-connected constituencies in an environment of change, uncertain demand, and reduced budgets. These conditions require their IT departments to enable governments to adapt to citizen requests in a sense-and-respond (S-R) manner. In this article, the application of S-R concepts is demonstrated by the approaches used in developing an IT strategic plan for Columbus, Ohio. The fractal-based, request-focused strategy used here creates a unified organizational and IT context for connecting the Department of Technology and city government departments to their customers by utilizing an incremental, lean portfolio-management-based action plan and architecture.