Diagnosis: We don’t understand each other

I found this article on e-week. It explains that the reason many IT projects fail is that business and IT units don’t know how to communicate with each other. What else is new? Business and IT people could’ve told you that 16 years ago. It’s probably been this way since there were such things as IT departments in companies. The classic dichotomy of IT being frustrated with the business managers, and the business managers being frustrated with the IT department has existed ever since.

This reminds me of a joke I heard several years ago that the people of the UK and Americans are two peoples separated by a common language. This is no different. 

Anyway, the article goes a little ways in trying to explain where each side, business and IT, are coming from and what their motivations are. It’s a start in promoting understanding, if anyone cares to explore this further. It doesn’t point to a solution to the problem.

I can’t say that I’ve run into every situation the author describes, but the attitude of each side sounds familiar. I can relate to the IT side of it, anyway. The description of the business managers only being concerned with budgets and schedules is right on the money. Do they care if the software that their IT folks are writing is well-designed? Heck no. They wouldn’t know a well designed product from a bunch of spaghetti code. All they care about is getting it done fast so it lessens the outlay for the project, or so they think. A good point made in the article is that business managers operate under the illusion that there is a point when a project can be considered “done”, whereas IT knows this is hardly ever true.

I understand that business and IT need each other. It saddens me that they don’t understand each other. The combination could be more powerful than it is currently if that understanding existed. As it is, it’s like a bad marriage. Both partners need each other, but they wish they didn’t.

Part of what I think is the problem is the management structures that business schools teach. The techniques used to manage IT projects are like that of designing a tangible product and putting it into mass production. IT doesn’t work like that. It’s like the business world has not caught on to the idea that we’re in the Information Age, not the Industrial Age. The structure is not suited to the task.

When I took software engineering in college we were taught that the ideal project management model was iterative development. “The Spiral Model” was given as an example. I haven’t worked for a place yet that uses iterative development. Instead they use what’s called “The Waterfall Model”.

My own solution, given as a good first step to the problem, would be to have universities insist that business students take some courses in computer science and/or IT/IS, and that computer science and IT/IS students take some business courses so that each will get a taste for what each side’s issues are, and what they have to deal with. If they could speak a common language, that would be a tremendous step forward.