The digital divide between the technology haves and have-nots is a common topic for seminars and articles within the IT industry. While steps are being taken to shrink this divide, what is not often discussed is the ever-widening chasm between technology and business.
Some IT vendors have realised that the lack of understanding allows them to sell companies more than they need.
Jason Norwood-Young, Technology editor, ITWeb
The majority of technology development is targeted at fulfilling business needs. It serves this purpose well, as proven by the degree to which companies rely on technology today. Take away a simple application like e-mail and many companies would grind to a halt. The chasm does not exist on the application development side. If anything, application development is overcompensating for any possible need, making sure that business has everything its little heart desires.
The vast mountains of software available to business are in fact one of the causes of the chasm. There is too much choice, and not enough know-how within business to choose the correct product for the job. There is simply so much hay out there that finding the needle to prick a particular business problem is near impossible.
Profit is all
The chasm seems to spring from miscommunication, or no communication. Techies and business people speak vastly different languages. A business does not care about multi-threading, clustering, component reuse, or the benefits of TCP/IP over frame relay. They are interested in - and understand - only profits and direct cause for profits. IT is predominantly only an indirect cause for profit.
Techies, in all honesty, don`t care about profit or loss. They enjoy fiddling with bleeding-edge concepts that definitely should not be rolled out into a running commercial environment due to their high-risk nature. They like tinkering with things, fixing things, and of course breaking things and putting them back together.
The tenuous link between business and technology - an IT vendor`s sales department and the IT manager of a company - also tend to miss the mark. The sales department often has less than a perfect understanding of their own products, through no fault of their own, but simply because not many engineers turn to sales. The IT manager is usually competent either only in a business role or technology role, and is typically so overworked anyway that he cannot spend as much time on technology decisions as he should do. He is, however, the most competent to make such decisions.
Now IT companies are trying to skip the IT manager and approach the CEO, COO and FD directly. This is further courting disaster, as these guys definitely won`t know much about integrated IP stacks or the difference between COM and Corba, and so the chasm widens.
Ignorance is bliss
Some IT vendors have realised that the lack of understanding allows them to sell companies more than they need. The companies - not understanding what the vendor is selling - always buy, thanks to some strange quirk of human nature. The easiest technology sells are to users who don`t understand what they`re getting. The chasm widens further.
Pushing the chasm up to Grand Canyon levels, the current trend is to sow confusion among businesses through loosely defined terms that are pushed as "business necessities in the new e-conomy."
When the term "e-commerce" emerged, no one really understood what it meant. The resultant confusion saw IT vendors claiming that their products - no matter what they were - were e-commerce enablers. Business was just starting to work its way through the smokescreen when e-business arrived. And how about e-procurement? E-tailing? M-commerce? These terms have more definitions than the word "cool".
While much of the chasm is the direct fault of IT vendors, it seems they are the ones who are most likely to fall into it and be swallowed up, while business will stand safely on the other side, and carry on without the hundreds of vendors and their thousands of products. Even the millions of CDs packed with bits and bites will not be enough for IT to fill the gap.
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