IT

Bridging the Gap Between ITand Your Businessby Thomas C. Redman and Bill Sweeney

OCTOBER 01, 2013

For the past several years we have watched with increasing dismay at the increasing chasm

between information technology (IT) groups and their business counterparts. From where we

sit, both sides have legitimate beefs: IT 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 their jobs are given the constraints under which they

operate. The business complains that IT doesn’t understand the business, consistently

overpromises and under-delivers, and slows innovation. CEOs, following the advice in

Nicolas Carr’s famous HBR article, “IT Doesn’t Matter,” perceive little strategic opportunity in

IT and devote as little time as possible to the issues. Finally, the usual calls for IT to get closer

to the business only exacerbate the situation. Neither side fully appreciates how difficult this

is. And half-hearted efforts are akin to putting in just enough energy to jump halfway across

the stream.

Frankly, we are sick and tired of the bickering, especially since the most important point gets

lost — 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.

The problem, strategic or not, must be resolved. Smart leaders will ignore the posturing and

work to close the gaps.

While we have no “silver bullet” solution, we do offer three steps that can help.

Quit making the same mistakes over and over again. It seems to us that, in far too many

companies, IT doesn’t have a fair chance. We see the same mistakes — some subtle, most not

so much — over and over. IT is asked to do things, such as improve data quality, which it

simply cannot do. 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. IT is asked to the table far too late to advise on the

difficulties of consolidating systems after a merger, then faulted when the task takes longer

and costs more. Or business silos blame IT because “systems don’t talk,” when the root issue

is that siloed departments don’t like working together.

None of these examples are new or different. Worse, too often we find people on both sides

fully cognizant that they’re heading for a train wreck, and then hopping onboard anyway. 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. The motivation for our second step is the

simple observation that 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. These

may include the COO’s demand for high systems reliability vs. the product manager’s desires

to bring new capabilities online quickly; the CFO’s desire that systems standardize processes

to keep costs low vs. the CMO’s demands that these same systems be flexible to promote

innovation; or the apparent attractiveness of the cloud to CEOs vs. legal counsel’s concerns

about data protection.

To find that middle ground, both should describe the trade-offs from their perspectives,

illuminating important subtleties along the way. There will be plenty of differences, but the

secret here is to find areas of agreement. It’s not so hard. We recall one case where six big

issues came up — and 27 areas of agreement. At least for a time, forget about the six, select a

few of the 27, and get to work on them. Good things happen. And in time the business

becomes a better consumer of IT and IT a better provider of business services.

Finally, companies should ask, “How do we expect IT to help us compete?” Today, this topic

simply doesn’t come up often enough, leading to a one-size-fits-all approach to managing IT,

often as a cost center. That’s fine for most functions and processes in most companies, where

middle-of-the-pack IT is good enough.

But all companies have areas where middle-of-the-pack IT is not good enough. 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. For 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.

Seen sequentially, step one clears the emotional clutter that poisons the relationship, step

two enables IT to achieve “trusted supplier” status, and step three helps build a true business

partnership in the areas that need it most. But we’re less interested in the order. Like it or not,

we live in a tech world, from Apple to Hadoop to Zip files. You can’t ignore the fact that

technology touches every facet of our lives. Better to get everything you can, leveraging every

byte and every ounce of knowledge IT can bring.

Thomas C. Redman, Ph.D., the Data Doc and President of Navesink Consulting Group, advises organizations on their

data and data quality programs. He is the author of Data Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset.

Bill Sweeney has 35 years of technology experience and has served as CTO for HSBC’s IB, Sector CIO for Citigroup’s

IB, and Head of Research Technology for Bridgewater Associates. He is the founder of Risk, Data, and Analytics, a

boutique consultancy focusing on those three areas.

This article is about IT

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