Business with IT, Part 1: Why can't we build what we want, the way we want it?

One of the biggest barriers in connected business is the gap between business' ambition and IT's willingness to carry it.

We've all seen it before: A business user with a gleam in his/her eye and a new title ("product owner") eagerly explaining a new idea or policy to the IT staff as if it could be implemented as easily as updating your social media. We cannot fault their enthusiasm. The junior devs might get excited too, dreaming of great systems that will define the industry and the little challenges that would make the development interesting. But that's where it usually stops.

Those devs with experience either in general or with the existing systems rarely share in the excitement. When they hear "new" they think "undocumented", "update" translates to "refactor" and "push" brings up thoughts of late nights in front of an uncaring screen. They will almost automatically dislike anything new that they have to design. These poor souls believe themselves the voice of sanity while submitting to their inner pessimist.

Next comes the design discussions, where business and IT engage in a battle of wills and jargon, duelling over each point and producing a design not wholly similar to the original concept. At this stage, the business side will begin to worry about their wonderful idea, and the path it is now taking in the hands of IT. From this point on, it will be adapted, redesigned and altered to conform to the whims and requirements of the developers.

In the end, few new concepts and developments survive construction unchanged, whether it's because of restraints in current systems or the ability of the developers, or any of the other myriad reasons for affecting the end result. This frustrates business no end as they are effectively at the mercy of their own IT departments. IT can't be ignored either, it's too deeply ingrained in modern business for it to not play a factor in every business decision.

This dependence on a restrictive concept can only hamper growth in the long run. Potential market-changers are held back by creaking infrastructures, new intelligent client communication campaigns are brought to ruin by missed deadlines, front-end applications are rendered useless by faulty networks et cetera. Business and IT don't always see eye-to-eye, but they need each other to exist in the current environment that they built together.

So how do we solve this problem? The first answer would be to improve communications between business and IT, then move on to newer, shinier IT standards and frameworks. But this is just a temporary solution that may or not work and will not produce results quickly. Another potential answer would be to empower business and give them more authority in the management of the IT department. This is doomed to fail and will lead to IT staff becoming unhappy with their work environment.

So solving this problem will take nothing short of a miracle? Not necessarily. A balance between business' vision and IT's ability to keep up to allow for growth without over-extending or building broken systems is possible, with the right tools. But what are these amazing tools that map the path to true business/IT co-existence?

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