Redefining the Battlefield: Conquering the Business-IT Divide

What you should know: I am currently working for Orbit Cloud Solutions as Cloud Advisor, but any posts on this blog reflect my own views and opinions only.

The gap between business and IT has been a long-standing issue. For decades, we’ve discussed the challenges of ensuring collaboration between these two key areas. Businesses have traditionally had difficulty understanding the complexities of technology, while IT departments have struggled to keep up with rapidly changing customer demands. Fortunately, advancements in technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are helping bridge this gap and enable businesses to make informed decisions about their IT investments.

I believe that we are indeed seeing a gap between business and commodity IT. Business and IT have been going through a period of divergence in recent years. As companies become increasingly reliant on technology, they are looking for ways to leverage it to maximize their competitive advantage. At the same time, IT is becoming more and more commoditized, with companies relying on off-the-shelf solutions instead of bespoke ones. This has led to a gap between business and commodity IT that is only growing wider.

In most industries, IT has become a vital component of production, essential for achieving success in the marketplace. IT enables increased efficiency and the ability to adapt and transform business models.

Nowadays, business professionals have a greater understanding of technology than ever before. Throughout their careers, they have witnessed numerous IT projects fail and a few succeed. Often, they know the intricacies of the IT landscape better than some IT department employees. These individuals have engaged in guerrilla development to accomplish their goals and, from both their professional and personal experiences, know what excellent IT solutions should look like.

Conflicts between business and IT typically arise at the intersection of business and what is referred to as industrialized IT. This is where the focus on making IT cheaper, more uniform, and standardized has created a climate resistant to change. The desire to employ the least expensive IT workers has resulted in a bureaucratic and inflexible mode of interaction.

As expected, the situation is more favorable when both business and IT share a mutual understanding of how customer value is generated. This occurs when there is a longstanding, effective communication between business and IT, and practicality takes precedence over bureaucratic formalities.

We have known about potential solutions to this business-IT gap for quite some time: establish a shared understanding of value streams, concentrate on work processes, create feedback loops to encourage learning, build enduring cross-functional teams, and avoid temporary, makeshift project groups. And eventually get rid of the idea that it is a good idea to have a third party maintain and manage the IT systems most critical for the future of your business the ITIL way.

That leads me to the question: Why are we still discussing this topic?