BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN IT AND BUSINESS

For the past several years we have watched with increasing dismay at the increasing chasm between information technology groups and their business counterparts.

The IT side complains that, despite the increasing penetration of technology into every nook and cranny of the business, it doesn’t have a seat at the table and no one understands how difficult its job is given the constraints under which it operates. The other side complains that IT doesn’t understand the business, slows innovation, and consistently overpromises and under-delivers.

Amid all this bickering, the most important point gets lost – that the failure to derive the full advantage of information technologies does enormous disservice to companies. Further, the pace of technological change and the demands to do more with the data grow exponentially and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. While we have no “silver bullet” solution, we do offer three steps that can help:

•Quit making the same mistakes over and over again.

People are not given adequate opportunity to provide input, nor educated on the new process and applications they are expected to use, and they blame IT for imposing something on them they do not like. Or business silos blame IT because “systems don’t talk,” when the root issue is that departments don’t like working together. It is time to put a stop to this. Both sides must acknowledge the mistakes of the past, resolve not to repeat them, and develop the courage to speak up.

•Find common ground on medium-term issues

Organizations develop trust when they know what to expect from each other. We propose business and IT work in that direction by bringing a few tough technological trade-offs front and center, with the goal of finding some middle ground.

•Companies should ask, ‘how do we expect it to help us compete?’

Companies must invest in these parts of IT for the long term. Importantly, the critical investment is less in any particular technology and more in building organizational capabilities. While few information technologies qualify as strategic – after all, they will be woefully out-of-date in three to five years – developing the ability to keep pace with the technology curve in these areas must be viewed as strategic.

 (Thomas C. Redman is president of Navesink Consulting Group and the author of “Data Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset.” Bill Sweeney is the founder of Risk, Data, and Analytics, a boutique consultancy focusing on those three areas.)

source: from Businessdayonline