Fixing the relationship between business and IT

Get the business/IT relationship right and you’ll get IT right. Right?

Wrong. It’s a necessary condition, not a sufficient one: Get the relationship between business and IT wrong and your chances of anything else going well is minimal. Get it right and you still have a lot more to do. But at least you’ll have a chance.

Which leads to a simple question, but the answer isn’t simple at all: What does “business/IT relationship” mean? The answer is compound and multidimensional. Getting it right includes laying out the right relationship model, establishing trust at all levels, reading the interpersonals right, and dealing with the delivery feedback loop, which can be either a vicious or virtuous cycle.

This week’s subject is getting the right relationship model in place, the starting point for any effective business/IT relationship. We’ll delve into the other aspects of the business/IT relationship in future missives.

Business/IT model No. 1: Priests and supplicants

Back when mainframes ruled IT and your loyal author had fully functional follicles, the relationship was between us — the high priests of the glass house — and our supplicants throughout the rest of the business. We, the anointed, were privy to the arcana. They, the dumb users, came to us with requests, which we in our profound wisdom either chose to satisfy or rejected as not worthy of our efforts.

I miss those days.

Business/IT model No. 2: Suppliers and customers

Somewhere along the way, business theorists decided the high priests/supplicant model was unhealthy  and should be replaced by something more benign. Thus was born the “internal customer.” Horrifyingly, instead of them begging us for crumbs, we were now entreated to make sure they were satisfied with the service we, as an internal supplier, provided them (unless they read Tom Peters; if they did we were supposed to delight them).

The business as a whole was supposed to work much better this way — as a “value chain” in which each component adds value to raw materials as they are transformed into finished products. It was enough to make your average economist swoon in admiration.

It was also a classic case of taking a bad situation and finding an ingenious way to make it much, much worse, because (as one reason among many) while we were now supposed to satisfy our internal customers, we never had enough budget to do so.

The problem we were trying to solve was resentment of our arrogance. The “solution” replaced arrogance with dysfunction. It didn’t work because it couldn’t work, but instead of giving it up in favor of something that could, the business punditocracy wasted decades developing an ever-more-elaborate set of governance mechanisms that were meant to solve it all. Instead, witness their main impacts:

• Add quite a lot of overhead in the form of IT steering committee meetings.
• Annoy everyone involved in the proceedings because no matter what the official governance policies, decisions ended up driven by politics more than business cases.
• Encourage businesses to outsource IT, because once IT had established itself as an independent supplier, why wouldn’t businesses consider other suppliers as well, especially when the one they had was so annoying? (See previous bullet.)

Business/IT model No. 3: “Information utilities”

As the deficiencies of the supplier/customer model (that is, everything about it) became increasingly apparent, pundits searching for an impressive-sounding alternative came up with this little gem. IT, they explained, would be like a power company. Just as you plug various appliances into a wall socket, without having to worry about where the electricity comes from, so you’ll plug your information appliance into the wall without having to worry about where the information comes from.

It sounded impressive and convincing for a while. Except for the part where what IT delivers isn’t actually information — it’s applications that make use of information. And the part where unlike AC current, where every cycle is exactly like every other cycle no matter who uses it, the applications and information IT provide are highly differentiated. Oh, by the way, I don’t want any other company getting the information coming out of my wall socket.

Eventually, the nearly complete incoherence of the information utility model was its undoing, although echoes remain in the form of the less convincing promotional material for cloud-based computing.

Business/IT model No. 4: Organ-based organizations

As long as we’re basing our relationship models on analogies, we might as well base one on something that demonstrably works — namely, how critters, including human beings, are put together.

Critters are composed of organs, which are composed of tissues, which are composed of individual cells. The brain isn’t the stomach’s customer, nor does that model the relationship between the spleen and the gall bladder. The parts of the whole aren’t independent organisms (except for the Portuguese man-of-war), the whole is emphatically more than just the sum of its parts, and there’s no internal value chain turning raw materials, such as food and oxygen, into finished products, including the deep thoughts you’re reading here.

When organizing a business, defining any department as separate and independent is a wonderful way to ensure the business is incapable of acting with collective purpose. It not only ensures the business will devolve into independent organizational silos, it legitimizes this behavior.

We can’t, of course, stick with the organs/organism vocabulary. If we did, everyone we need to persuade will flash back to their high school days when they gagged while dissecting a formalin-infused fetal pig, consequently rejecting our brilliant idea out of hand because of its unpleasant associations.

What we can do: Eschew the use of analogies entirely, and instead say what we mean.

It is: The proper relationship between IT and every other part of the business is that of peers that collaborate with each other so as to make the business as a whole successful.

Peer and collaborator — it isn’t fancy. It’s more prosaic than impressive. I’d like to think that’s part of its charm.

This story, “Fixing the relationship between business and IT,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.