There's an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review that breaks down the relationship between IT and the business depending on two factors: the reliability of IT and the need for IT innovation in the line of business.<p>The result is that you can lump the relationship of IT and the business into 4 categories:<p>Defensive: Factory Mode (High Reliability Need, Low Innovation Need)
Defensive: Support Mode (Low Reliability Need, Low Innovation Need)
Offensive: Strategic Mode (High Reliability Need, High Innovation Need)
Offensive: Turnaround Mode (Low Reliability Need, High Innovation Need)<p>If the blog poster worked for a company in the defensive mode categories, his approach would definitely not be welcome in most cases, unless he had a major reliability argument.<p>Hopefully, he found a position in a company aligned with the Offensive side of the quadrants.<p>The article I mentioned is Nolan & McFarlen, "Information Technology and the Board of Directors", Harvard Business Review, Oct 2005.
Over the years I found that the fundamental problem between IT and Business people is trust.<p>IT folks (me included) consider themselves too smart for the MBA guys, as they call them, incapable of understanding the basics principles. IT folks rarely bother to speak frankly in company meetings because they thinks other folks will never get it; they push everyone else to consider then as a black box with ability to solve business life saving problems.<p>The reality is the MBA guys runs the business and are force to interact with the inhuman black box like they will do with a vending machine: You place an order, get results and move on.
This article really hit the nail on the head about what's wrong with large corporate IT. Unless your business is IT, the upper management just don't understand it, therefore it's just part of doing business.
Finance and HR are seen as an integral part of the company, IT is seen as a vendor. It is very much and patron-client relationship, when it should be a partnership
<i>The majority of changes in CA IT are driven by the business.</i><p>Exactly! As it should be. (As it better be.) The challenge for IT is to prove what they want is in the best interest of the <i>business</i>, not the IT department. We know that, we just have trouble <i>communicating</i> it.<p><i>Why should the business care about getting new servers or having developers waste their time rewriting already functioning code?</i><p>It's <i>your</i> job to answer that question. They just don't know. I had a client with slow response times the previous holiday season. Business had doubled since then. I had to paint a clear picture of what it would be like on the same infrastruture for the upcoming holiday season. x dollars spent vs. y business lost. That's a language they can understand.<p><i>Most people in corporate IT want to do a good job.</i><p>And that job is much more than development or administration. One of corporate IT's biggest job is <i>education</i>. We shouldn't blame others for not understanding what is clear to us. It's also our job to get them to "see the light".<p>(Maybe that's why I like hacking so much. I find it much easier communicating with my computer than with the bosses.)