IT and Business have, in the practise, different objectives, which is strange: Business and IT both are there to make an organization work as one whole, one objective and one mindset should be the main criteria. In the real-world a lot of organizations don’t have this luxury, they work separately, and therefore they work as different organizations.
In my previous post, I stated that it’s a sad, sad thing when projects are exclusively in the IT department. And, of course, this was forcing open doors and both on Twitter and Ome-B.nl itself some comments on this post where made. And understandable. This is, for people in our Business pretty scary. But beware: when I talk about facilitating, I don’t mean to say that we can’t have a proactive attitude towards this. When I say projects shouldn’t be in the IT department, I don’t state that they should be in the departments of business itself, it should be a conjoined project.
A common situation is that the IT department has a bad name inside an organization. Delivering working software later than planned (or just late, because they plan very careful), not the right software or are just very expensive. Another thing can be that IT departments just are simply overworked, because they have to keep old systems running, business changes more rapidly than they can manage, and expenses are raising. Therefore a lot of organizations have departments that simply develop their own software, which creates the same problem over and over again.
If we could change or break this cycle, we could make IT and Business alignment (or even IT and Business Fusion) really work. The IT department focused on delivering and facilitating change in a rapid scale, Business working on the projects they need to be focussed on. IT as an active ‘partner in crime’ and as the innovative factor within the organization. Therefore create a more cost-effective and solution-effective organization. Not to mention more happy people and better business. Please be Seated, but participate actively.
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I work in a health care organization where the opposite is the case. The business drives almost ALL decisions. Clueless move after clueless move. And instead of IT trying to be a partner, we even just added “Service” to our name. Sigh.
Hi there Mark,
Thanks for you comment! This is some unfortunate situation you’re telling about. It still is weird that organizations have an ‘us versus them’ mentality when it comes to automation / IT.
Can you give me an example on how it affects business that they see the IT department as just a service department?
Regards,
Douwe Pieter