Business and IT people are ever at odds, aren’t they? Business often complains that IT doesn’t see the “Big Picture”, and IT laments business’s incomplete vision of technology.
Part of the “disconnect” between Business and IT people is that, at heart, they are very different people – you could say a different species. Their goals and their drives are not always aligned. Of course both care about the overall success of the company. But business people tend to be more concerned with aspects such as market strategy, customer retention, increasing revenue and decreasing spending, while IT people tend to focus on the correct architecture, streamlined systems, and optimal integration. Business places the emphasis on “What is the end result?” while IT is more interested in “How stuff works better.”
So where can IT and Business people find common ground? There are three areas where this can happen: methodology, technology and speech.
First, it’s important to identify where Business and IT can fall into misunderstandings. This tends to happen at contact points between the two, such as in meetings, conference calls and emails. It often occurs in such places when each group uses words that are not meaningful to the other.
For example, Business terminology includes words such as: Cost of transaction, revenue, customer retention, efficiency, visibility, bottom line, FTEs, ROI. Whereas IT terminology includes words like: architecture, controls, web application, UX, integration, data source, topology, permissions, error handling. Often, IT and Business meetings where such words are used can result in miscommunication and lack of clarity on both sides.
If one could find a common language, with words and ideas that make sense and mean the same thing to these very different species, one may come closer to the goal – achieving Business-IT harmony.
Where to Start?
A unique place to start is inside the application building process. Miscommunication tends to happen in boardroom meetings, or via email or even phone calls. But what if you could get business and IT people together in the same room in a workshop, to actually build a prototype of an application? If you did that, you would cut through a lot of jargon, and get down to the practical aspects of what needs to be done and why it’s so important. PNMsoft advocates Evolutionary BPM Methodology, which places great importance in such rapid-build workshops.
A second area for better communication is surprisingly within the technology itself. Increasingly, business technologies are enabling people to communicate with each other within the design interface. For example, in PNMsoft Sequence, our App Studio now includes a Dual View interface which enables business and IT teams to collaborate on building BPM applications. Dual View enables Business Analysts to model the application, and then IT developers to build out that model on the same canvas. Business and IT people can even write each other inline comments, to help better understand each other.
Finally, one could adopt an “out of the box” approach of creating a set of common words – a sort of micro-language – which are understandable to both IT and Business. These words won’t be too high-level businesslike, and won’t be too tech-like. This sort of common language is already beginning to exist, as IT and Business people are forced to search for common ground.
What could be words in this common language? For example:
- User experience
- Customer experience
- Dashboards
- Time to solution
- Business application
- Production
- Real-time changes
- Optimization
- Limitations
- Performance
- System to system
A positive trend is that many people are actually starting to “crossover” the Business-IT divide. CIOs who understand business problems. Business Analysts who are “citizen developers”. Such people are bridging the gap between IT and Business, as they have their feet in both worlds. But not everyone is there yet, and not everyone necessarily should be. Even with great differences, it is possible to achieve harmony.
Using these approaches (Methodology, Technology and Language) you will be taking an important step toward uniting your business into one harmonized team, which works better together and can achieve more.
We’d be happy to help you achieve a common language between Business and IT, especially around Business Processes. Complete the form below for a demo of our BPM software, which facilitates Business and IT harmony.
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