Because the role of IT organizations is to enable business managers to run their businesses better, there has been a constant need for aligning IT closer to business. We often hear business managers complain that a software solution isn't what the business needed.

We have personal experience with this problem - in a previous life one of us worked for a consulting company that built turnkey applications for large enterprises. In such projects, a typical lifecycle starts with a set of consultants who visit the customer and capture requirements in a Word document. Better-run projects include screenshots of the future application in the requirements documents. Several months later, the software is delivered, followed by a lengthy maintenance phase. The budget allocation for the maintenance and enhancements of the application is typically several times higher than the initial budget for developing the application. And behold, more than 75% of post-deployment enhancements are requirements that weren't captured correctly in the analysis phase or originated after the analysis phase was over. To address these issues, it's critical for the gap between business and IT to close earlier in the cycle and that a model of the continuous business process evolution be supported to respond to the constant change requests made throughout the process development cycle.