As well as anything else in this world information technologies live in their own life-cycle. They need to be somehow created, need a special treatment during their lifetime and also need a renewal when they retire. We could say that IT related products and services copy the IT life-cycle:

• IT analysis > stands for an initial analysis of the whole IT infrastructure. Goal is to find and point out all major issues. Output from this phase is very important and is a prerequisite for all following phases. Output is in the form of an audit report.
  
  
• IT design > based on issues from the analysis report, an action plan listing all corrective steps is created. These actions should remove all detected issues and optimize the utilization of either existing or newly proposed technologies. Usually, multiple design plans are created which take into account various customer needs from technical, procedural or financial perspective.
  
  
• IT testing / pilot > after the needed changes get approved, a thorough testing is started. The goal is to eliminate all the unpredictable failures which might arise as a result of implemented changes.
  
  
• IT implementation > after a successful pilot, real implementation is started. Important part of the implementation phase is a documentation creation process. It should reflect as much as possible all the changes.
  
  
• IT maintenance > with every even a minor change a risk of misunderstanding, human error or technical error arises. Therefore, a new implementation needs a lot of fine tuning and bug fixes. Monitoring of these events and their operational solving is the major part of this phase. Also, a crisis management is often a very challenging activity both from the technical and communication perspective.
  
  
• IT renewal > very important phase, which includes a renewal plan of systems and technologies and a related financial planning.