Why IT and business just can’t get along

When IT and business staff clash, things can get ugly quick. Everyone has experienced some measure of tension across the business/IT divide. But is that tension a simple clash of personalities — or is it a clash of cultures? Solve the wrong problem, and tensions are likely to escalate.

At many organizations, this environment of conflict between business and IT is commonplace. It hinders daily operations and interferes with ongoing projects. Worse, it can prevent IT from evolving to meet the expectations of next-generation IT.

As a result, fixing this tension should be a high priority for everyone on both sides of the divide. And the first step in fixing a contentious business/IT relationship is an accurate diagnosis. If you get that wrong, if you don’t fully understand why IT clashes with the rest of the business, your solution has virtually no chance of working.

Next-generation IT

As a reminder, next-generation IT embraces three core principles (he asserted with his usual and abundant humility):

1. IT is the steward of the company’s information resources, not the owner
2. IT empowers end users to be innovators by opening new technological doors for them as motivated by end-user choice
3. IT is strategic in supporting “single-actor business practices” — a significant tactical shift from years of paying attention only to core processes

To play that role, IT needs a positive, healthy, and properly defined relationship with the rest of the business. The question is how to make that happen.

The “gang of 16” organized by Paul Glen (of “Leading Geeks” fame), his business partner Maria McManus, and yours truly descended on Las Vegas a few weeks ago to discuss just what that takes to establish a thriving relationship between IT and business. (Michael Hugos, one of the participants, describes a snippet in a recent CIO.com write-up titled “Are Geeks Different?”)

Our conversation was wide-ranging. It hasn’t yet resulted in consensus … unsurprising given the multidimensional nature of the challenge.

Personality vs. culture

All of us who participated in the discussion agree that communication between IT professionals and business professionals is frequently ineffective, and we all believe that this is a problem that has to be rectified if the business/IT relationship is to be placed on a solid footing.

We also agree (I think) that this lack of effective communication is a root cause of dysfunctional business/IT relationships, not the root cause.

Were you to ask all 16 of us where we disagree, however, you’d probably get 16 different answers. This is, after all, a work in progress and we have more progress yet to make than progress yet achieved.

Here’s my take on the nub of it: Some in the conversation believe the core issue is that IT professionals have a distinct personality type. We’re geeks, geeks have a different way of thinking than the non-geeks who inhabit the rest of the enterprise, and it’s the difference in how we think that’s the core issue.

Assuming  there is a distinct geek personality type, what is it? As a quick short-hand, figure it’s everything pop-psych usually associates with left-brain thinking: linear, logical, analytical, and so on.

My own view is that the geekiness that characterizes IT is due less to personality type than to IT professionals being embedded in a distinct, “geek” culture.

Here’s why.

The mathematics of personalty clashing

No matter how strongly anyone thinks that “geek” is a personality type, nobody would claim that everyone in IT is a geek, or that everyone outside IT isn’t a geek. For that matter, it’s doubtful anyone would consider geekiness to be an all-or-none proposition: If geekiness is a personality type, it’s a continuum, with über–nerds on one end of the scale and performance artists on the other.

Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that two out of every three IT professionals have a lot of geek factor in their personalities, while only one out of every four non-IT employees does — quite a strong correlation between personality type and profession; the numbers aren’t likely to be more extreme than this.

Given these numbers, two-thirds times three-quarters … half … of all interactions between IT and non-IT employees will be between IT geeks and non-IT non-geeks.

That’s enough to present a challenge, but not so overwhelming as to characterize the whole business/IT relationship.

Geek culture: The greater issue

Compare this to the cultural diagnosis.

Culture has been defined by lots of different people in lots of different ways. My own consulting company borrowed its definition from a branch of anthropology called ethnoscience, which defines culture as “the learned behavior people exhibit in response to their environment.”

An interesting bit about “their environment” is that in a business setting, most of the environment each employee works in is the behavior of the other employees they work with. It’s a self-reinforcing loop, which means that unlike personality, which varies a lot from one employee to the next, culture is shared. Those who participate in it acculturate … they converge in how they respond to different situations.

So while even with some fairly extreme assumptions, personality-type-driven clashes are likely to be the cause of conflict in no more than 50 percent of all IT/non-IT interactions, a clash of cultures is built into the fabric of things.

And make no mistake: IT does have a distinct culture. It has to, because in order to succeed in the work, all IT professionals have to approach their work with a certain mindset that’s different from how employees who plow the fields of marketing, sales, manufacturing, human resources, and even accounting and finance think about their responsibilities.

Dealing with culture clash

As do employees who work together anywhere, those of us who work in IT develop a shared vocabulary, a set of largely unconscious shared assumptions, and shared patterns of thinking. These shared cultural traits streamline and simplify our communication. A common culture makes IT more effective.

Regrettably, they also lead to IT professionals thinking of everyone in IT as “us” and everyone else in the company to be “them.” It’s a dangerous state of affairs, as dividing the world into us and them is how tribalism happens — how we come to consider our self-identified group to be the source of all that’s right and good in the world, while all the others are shifty, dangerous, ugly, and (lucky for us) incompetent, too.

“We” can’t trust “them,” and the proof is that when we try to explain our position on an issue, they just don’t get it, and when they try to explain their position on an issue, they’re utterly incoherent, or else they just lie to us.

Oh, and by the way: It’s worse — within IT we have distinct subcultures that clash as well, as anyone knows who has heard Unix and Windows sysadmins go at it on an engineering issue. (Those who prefer Apple products aren’t, however, a subculture. They practice a religion.)

Humans are intrinsically tribal creatures. Want evidence? Over and over again, when studying languages, it turns out the word people use to refer to themselves is “the people.” Everyone else in the world? They aren’t included.

So you aren’t going to solve the inevitable clash of cultures by lecturing on the evils of tribalism. All that will do is reinforce the view held by everyone in your tribe that they’re just fine. The problem, your fellow MoTs (Members of the Tribe) will conclude, is that “they” are so tribal, unlike us.

No matter where you sit, inside or outside IT, and no matter what your level in the organizational hierarchy, you have a role to play in solving this.

You might think the solution is tolerance, but it isn’t. Tolerance just won’t cut it, because all it requires is that you learn to put up with those idiots. That’s what “tolerate” means.

No, what’s needed is deeper and more difficult than tolerance. What’s needed is respect — the recognition that different doesn’t have to mean better or worse. It can mean each tribe has something to learn from the others.

That’s the short version. We’re out of space, so the long version will have to wait until next week.

This story, “Why IT and business just can’t get along,” 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.