More than ever before, businesses seek to wield IT as a competitive weapon–one that can help the business satisfy ever-increasing customer requirements. IT is under pressure to act less as a provider of technology and more as a partner fully engaged with the larger organization to achieve business objectives. To rise to this challenge, IT must focus on the issue of primary importance to the business–namely customers. To demonstrate how it can support customer requirements, IT will typically present to the business a wide range of key metrics focusing on issues such as application uptime, network availability, database response times and the like. Where IT scores high on these key performance indicators, this is often taken as evidence that IT is supporting high levels of customer service.