The relationship between Information Technology (IT) and business is always a hot topic. Does IT drives business or business owns IT? The answer depends on who is giving the answer. Although I have a very strong IT background, my answer always is that the business should dictate IT contradicting to the most IT professionals. To me, IT does not generate revenue unless IT is the core of the business that generates revenues. IT helps business to run more efficiently and provide competitive advantages. From IT's perspective, the cutting edgy technologies are exciting, cool, and fashionable. But does it make any sense in adaption the latest technologies if business case is not yet made? I remembered Joe ask the question of how do yo justify the cost of IT projects in class. From a business's perspective, any project only makes sense to accomplish a specific goal, most of the time, return over investment. The difficulty of justifying any IT project makes me believe that only business can understand the true value of the IT project. This is not to say that IT does not have any role of how to implement the business' requirements. IT knows the capabilities the technologies and how to choose the best technologies to meet the requirements.
Some may complain that business does not know what is the best technology for them. It is true that business often lacks behind the technology trends. But IT must learn how to educate business the latest trends and capabilities of the technologies. Just like how business push a new product to the customers. You need a strategy to show off your new products to attract customers. Business is the customer of IT so why should not IT adapt the same strategy like business, marketing technologies to the business? But IT should use a different word for this process, education. It is important not to educate business only IT thinks business should know, in another word, do not pick the technology for business, let the business pick the technology. There should not be any favoritism, like luring business to the technologies that IT thinks are the best by hiding any pros and cons of the each technologies. IT must have faith that business will pick the best technologies for itself.
I read the blog titled, IT leaders, It's time to Give It Up, the writer states that business users are arguing for the control of the technology adaption because of the delay. With outsourcing increasingly becomes popular, there is a viable alternative other than your own IT out there. In fact according to Gardner's survey, by 2012, 20 percent of the business will have no IT assets at all. IT needs to have the urgency to serve business better and cheaper. What do you think?
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I agree with you, to an extent. I definitely think that business needs to drive IT for the most part, and that IT initiatives always need to be evaluated on business terms (return on investment).
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, there is an issue with this as a blanket approach for all companies in all situations. Some companies who are trying to be the cutting edge leaders of IT (Google, for example) benefit by letting their developers loose. At Google, for 20% of any developer's time, the developer can work on anything they want, regardless of its business application. The results of this approach for Google have been pretty positive: about 50% of Google's launched products have come from that 20% time. This way, Google is able to benefit from the creativity and innovation of its developers and therefore remain cutting edge, and is also able to do so without sacrificing too much productivity on existing projects.