Dear Bob ...You've written before about how IT interacts with Marketing. I believe the subject has been perhaps a little over simplified.There are different risk tolerance characteristics between the different groups as well as different goals. The different groups of people don't look across groups to find affirmation of their point of view, but rather they look to their peers (and you have pointed out that som Dear Bob …You’ve written before about how IT interacts with Marketing. I believe the subject has been perhaps a little over simplified.There are different risk tolerance characteristics between the different groups as well as different goals. The different groups of people don’t look across groups to find affirmation of their point of view, but rather they look to their peers (and you have pointed out that someone has to come up with cross communication). In my experience even attempting the cross communication is difficult. When you try to talk about “return on investment” to management you might find out that they already regard the costs you are trying to save as “sunk”. What that really means is you aren’t following the plan they have put together and they don’t want to follow your plan. I wonder if it isn’t more of an issue of coming from different tribes within the village… – On the engineering sideDear Engineer …Here’s how I think about this kind of thing: Let’s take as a given that the different groups have different levels of risk tolerance and so on. If we allow that to shape the dialog, we’re having the wrong conversation – something along the lines of, “I’m an intuitive, so don’t waste my time with facts and logic.” The risk tolerance of each group has nothing to do with the business requirements of the situation, so letting it drive a decision amounts to decision by personality quirk. What needs to happen is for someone to be the adult in the conversation – to ask, explicitly, what level of risk (and defect rate, and delivery speed, and so on) is appropriate to the specific business situation. It is, after all, about what’s best for the business, not about what’s most comfortable for one constituency. Unless, that is, IT adopts the “internal customer” model, at which point its goal is to make its internal customers happy, not to make the business optimally effective. As I say – just how I look at it. In practice, it takes a lot of effort to redirect the conversation this way. – Bob Technology Industry