IT and business remain apart — and that’s a good thing

Business unit leaders claim IT organizations don’t understand business needs, don’t know how to deliver technology that helps the business fast enough or smart enough, and generally live in their own little world more akin to an Amish village than a modern city. So say two studies, one from the Hackett Group and one from McKinsey, both organizations that specialize in understanding business execs’ views of technology.

We’ve been hearing about this business/IT divide for more than a decade once the Y2K, e-commerce, and ERP “hero IT” honeymoons wore off in the learly 2000s. It’s clear that nothing has changed: IT still doesn’t get it, and businesspeople are still frustrated. All those efforts at IT/business alignment, at embedding IT in the business, hiring businesspeople instead of technology experts to run IT, and all the other techniques preaches by consultants and pundits seem to have had zero effect. We’ve wasted all that time and effort.

Perhaps, then, it’s time to blow the whole thing up because it can’t be fixed and get rid of the notion of centralized IT altogether.

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The truth is that blowing up IT is as silly as trying to keep IT fully centralized. Part of the IT/business divide is healthy and will persist no matter what your organizational strategy for the CIO and the IT department. What is needed is a serious rethink of that strategy, one that gets past all the territorial defenses you have in place to perpetuate the status quo. You want to close the unhealthy IT/business divide but keep the healthy IT/business divide.

The healthy IT/business divide exists no matter how you manage IT Part of the divide between business units and IT is a natural and healthy phenomenon, says Erik Dorr, a senior research director at Hackett Group. “There’s more technology and invocation going on than any organization or group of individuals can absorb. That creates the platform for disappointment.” In other words, we all see things we want and can even, thanks to the consumerization of technology, do on our own, without IT. But we also ignore what we can’t figure out.

This set of realities leads to everyone having a different set of needs and priorities. As a company tries to reconcile that with its business strategy (a similarly fractured set of goals and capabilities), the divide between aspiration and reality becomes apparent. IT is often blamed because its job is to do the technology. Once it starts functioning, we simply assume its existence and look for the next need or desire to fulfill. Any credit IT earned is quickly forgotten, and we know only what’s wrong.

If there were no tension between aspiration and reality, it would mean the company lacks ambition and is satisfied with the status quo. That usually leads to a company’s demise.

The trick is to understand when the IT/business divide is based on the never-ending desire for more, with the uneven pace of being able to satisfy the desires that matter and learning to let go of those that don’t affect the organization, even if they impact us as individuals. “There’s a natural limitation to how much technology-based change and innovation that individuals can absorb,” Dorr says. “There’s no amount of talent management can accelerate that to the point where orgs and people change as fast as the underlying technology, so there will always be a frustration.”

That’s healthy frustration, a sign that the company’s employees are yearning to do better. If the IT/business gap stays relatively steady over time in such a company, it’s a benign divide between ambition and capability. After all, you can’t always get what you want, at least not quickly, and sometimes you don’t need it.

The unhealthy IT/business divide and the IT organization that no longer makes sense If that divide grows, you have an indication that ambitions are unrealistic and/or capability is inadequate. Solving that may require better management to focus on achievable ambitions as well as better IT to deliver on the capabilities. And “IT” may not mean the IT department, but technology efforts within business units — decentralized IT that a CIO and other business leaders orchestrate. That IT isn’t a department but a function more akin to finance, which every business unit partially owns and manages, even if it’s ultimately under the stewardship of the CFO.

The consumerization movement ended the era of the IT department as the be-all, end-all of technology. As technology becomes a core part of how we work and what we deliver, the notion of the IT department as the sole tech group stopped making sense. IT folks call this “shadow IT,” as if it were a bad thing, but the truth is that IT people are often the ones living in the shadows, oblivious to what’s going on in the wider world.

In truth, IT is really several departments: support, operations, design and development, integration and architecture, and assessment and purchasing. IT should be decomposed along such lines. Maybe they report to a CIO in the kind of dotted-line relationship that sales, marketing, and manufacturing typically report to the CFO, to ensure overall alignment. How you federate the technology efforts across your company is partially a matter of your industry and culture, but it is — or should be — a federation.

The relative balance in that federation is likely not right in your company, though. “Now that technology is no longer just about the back office of processing transactions, the real challenge is to pivot around revenue generation, not just about how to keep the lights on,” says Mark Peacock, the IT Transformation practice leader at Hackett Group. When I go to CIO conferences, “keeping the lights on” dicussions still unfortunately dominate, a sign that IT is an operational group, not a strategic one. That’s fine as long as you admit it — and allow someone else to be strategic.

In smarter companies, the Hackett Group sees a split between the “run” crew — app maintenance and infrastructure — and the technology-expoitation staff. Peacock says the “run” crew is composed of “basically plant managers.” For exploiting technology for new, often new-revenue-oriented purposes, Hackett sees companies having a separate build organization that is project-oriented.

But most companies still seek what Peacock calls a “unicorn” — a magical CIO who can make all facets of IT work perfectly, both operationally and strategically, both to support everything that now exists and anticipate and exploit all new technologies so that no one has to think about what might be missing or could be improved. That magical thinking is where businesses create some of the IT/business divide they so dislike.

If you can separate the various aspects of IT, you can then understand which of the divides are healthy and which are not. My guess is that when most businesspeople complain about the IT/business divide, they mostly mean the technology support group and the (often nonexistent) technology development group.

The support staff is an easy target, especially in companies where IT tends to live in the shadows and doesn’t interact with users — you know, the kind of shop that assumes no trouble tickets means everything is fine. No, as any parent of a small child can tell you, silence means something bad is probably happening. In the case of support, it means employees went off on their own to find and use solutions that work for them. That’s actually a healthy response, and a smart company will take advantage of it by creating a framework that allows safe use of idiosyncratic technology choices.

The lack of (apparent) technology exploitation may be exacerbated by an operationally focused IT department, but it’s a sign that no single organization can handle all technology. A good example of such a nonstrategic IT department is one still obsessing over the BYOD notion. Peacock does note that many CIOs were forced to lay off their strategic IT staff during the 2008-2012 recession, so that operational focus may not be in fact by the CIO’s fault.

Which brings me back to the notion that IT should be thought of as a federation of roles, but more than as simply a federation of technology departments. The federation must include business units that buy, manage, and even create their own technologies — marketing, for example — as well as individual users who tend to explore new tech, such as those who adopted the iPad years before IT would admit its existence, who relied on Amazon Web Services to spin up test bed environments, and who adopted consumer technologies like Dropbox and Google Calendar to more easily collaborate with each other and outsiders.

It’s a rare IT organization that does this kind of proactive, out-of-the-box technology exploration. If you have one, savor it. If you don’t, stop expecting IT to act that way. If it’s not doing that now, it’s clearly not culturally able to do so. Let some other group do it instead, and let your IT department do whatever it is actually good at.

At the end of the day, you want groups — whatever they’re called — doing what they’re good at and staying out of the way of others. This is where you can narrow the IT/business divide, by reforming it as a federation of groups, not as duopoly that focuses on the wall between it. If you do that, you’ll be left with the IT/business divide you do want: one based on aspirations that are always pulling you forward.

This article, “IT and business remain apart — and that’s a good thing,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.