Increasingly, I shudder every time I hear someone in a technology role talk about "The Business."
You know, like this:
We need The Business to give us the requirements.
Or, we need to get someone from The Business to weigh in on this.
Or, if The Business can just tell us what they want and stop changing their minds we could get this project delivered.
Embedded in the very term is an old, outdated way of thinking. It implies that technology is somehow separate from the main line of work that a company does. We're an office supply store. We have IT systems to help us order products, manage inventory, and track sales, but that's not "our business." Our business is selling office supplies to customers.
If such a stance was ever really tenable, it ceased to be so once customers started ordering all their office supplies online instead of going into brick-and-mortar stores and suddenly the online commerce system became the very center of the business.
In 21st century companies, technology is no longer a back-office support role. The IT/Business divide is one of the biggest sources of friction within organizations, and it prevents them from being able to innovate and adapt to rapidly-changing markets. For innovative companies today, technology IS the business, and vice-versa.
This isn't to say that should be no distinctions in roles within teams. Being able to write effective, efficient software code or diagnose a network failure takes a different set of skills and temperament than, say, understanding why customers want to buy one product and not another or how competitors are charging for their offering. But these days the people with those differing skills and abilities need not to be isolated in different parts of the building—or perhaps even in entirely different cities—but instead sitting side by side together, collaborating to constantly redefine and drive forward the business (with a lower case 'b').
I can think of no better way to get started than to forbid anyone on a technology team from referring to other groups as "The Business." This is more than a symbolic thing. Just the mental gymnastics of having to come up with a different term to describe non-technical counterparts should go a long way toward bridging the pernicious IT/Business gap.
So what do we call "The Business" instead? Referring to individual roles would be a start: we need a marketing analyst to review this text. Perhaps better would be just to say Bob or Sally should help us revise this text. Even better would be to just lean across the work table and say, "Hey, Sally, how does this look?"
More than anything, though, companies need people in roles who can cut across traditional boundaries—that is, individuals who can both understand the company's market and customers and their needs as well as see the potential for enabling how products are delivered to those customers through technology.
I won't even bother to see if "The Business" will approve this idea.
You know, like this:
We need The Business to give us the requirements.
Or, we need to get someone from The Business to weigh in on this.
Or, if The Business can just tell us what they want and stop changing their minds we could get this project delivered.
Embedded in the very term is an old, outdated way of thinking. It implies that technology is somehow separate from the main line of work that a company does. We're an office supply store. We have IT systems to help us order products, manage inventory, and track sales, but that's not "our business." Our business is selling office supplies to customers.
If such a stance was ever really tenable, it ceased to be so once customers started ordering all their office supplies online instead of going into brick-and-mortar stores and suddenly the online commerce system became the very center of the business.
In 21st century companies, technology is no longer a back-office support role. The IT/Business divide is one of the biggest sources of friction within organizations, and it prevents them from being able to innovate and adapt to rapidly-changing markets. For innovative companies today, technology IS the business, and vice-versa.
This isn't to say that should be no distinctions in roles within teams. Being able to write effective, efficient software code or diagnose a network failure takes a different set of skills and temperament than, say, understanding why customers want to buy one product and not another or how competitors are charging for their offering. But these days the people with those differing skills and abilities need not to be isolated in different parts of the building—or perhaps even in entirely different cities—but instead sitting side by side together, collaborating to constantly redefine and drive forward the business (with a lower case 'b').
I can think of no better way to get started than to forbid anyone on a technology team from referring to other groups as "The Business." This is more than a symbolic thing. Just the mental gymnastics of having to come up with a different term to describe non-technical counterparts should go a long way toward bridging the pernicious IT/Business gap.
So what do we call "The Business" instead? Referring to individual roles would be a start: we need a marketing analyst to review this text. Perhaps better would be just to say Bob or Sally should help us revise this text. Even better would be to just lean across the work table and say, "Hey, Sally, how does this look?"
More than anything, though, companies need people in roles who can cut across traditional boundaries—that is, individuals who can both understand the company's market and customers and their needs as well as see the potential for enabling how products are delivered to those customers through technology.
I won't even bother to see if "The Business" will approve this idea.
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