I sat through a number of sessions at a tech conference on Thursday, which I found very useful in terms of understanding the technical landscape of one of our key partner’s solution portfolio. After presentation two or three maybe (and I cant rule out the effects of caffeine crash – as there weren’t nearly enough coffee breaks) I began to get rather irritated with the whole ‘business v’s IT debate’.
In SOA (and we were mostly talking SOA, BPM and a little on E2.0) the promise of ‘IT / Business’ alignment was often mooted. I always found this phraseology a little difficult ‘to swallow’, but on the understanding that it meant ‘the business’ would wake up to ‘IT’s value’ I was happy to play along.
Four, maybe five years into the pure-play SOA journey (I’ve been doing MOM and EDA for 10 years) I thought we would have made more in-roads into the psyche of the ‘business / IT’ division. SOA philosophy talks about the necessity to break down organisational (even world-wide) corporate silos, but what are we doing by still making reference in IT presentations to ‘the business’? Well, in my view this creates and reinforces the ultimate silo – the silo of IT. It isn’t much good breaking down systems and organisational silos for them to be replaced by one of the worst ‘them and us’ cultures of the ‘uber-IT silo’.
Terms also in vogue that I ‘hate’ are utility and commodity. Why? Well, because this is reinforcing an idea of separation of IT from core business value. In aviation, I wouldn’t want to separate the pilot from the engine! The commodity and utility play is certainly a sweet spot for the cost-savvy CIO, but any sense of IT value is being further diluted. Innovation is the battleground on which I would fight this perception.
We will fall into a dangerous trap if we play along too closely with these messages. IT is the business and often the business is IT, so resist compartmentalising especially alongside the perception of downgraded value (you are not commodities!). I see this having a rather negative effect on IT overall and with tumbling graduate numbers and a recent report that 60% of tech staff will eventually go into ‘business roles’ (another misnomer) I think reinforcement will only starve supply as graduates take the step straight into what they consider the higher-value roles at the ‘centre of the action’.
Really – let’s have no more silos, and for the next conference – lots more coffee!
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