The struggle is real.
If you ask many business units about their pet-peeve, amongst many other things like bureacracy or pressure or even working conditions, you will nearly always find a dislike for their IT partners. IT costs too much, IT doesn’t deliver what we need. IT this. IT that.
For IT, they also have their own frustrations with the business. The business asks for too much. The business doesn’t tell us what they want. The business doesn’t appreciate how much we do for them. Business this. Business that.
Communication.
Most of the time, the frustration is caused by differences in communication style and the choice of language used between sender and receiver. It is rare to find a business person who can “speak” IT and the reverse is also true.
PowerPoint is not a substitute for improving communications.
Bullet points and fancy graphs can be helpful, but the trick is to understand the language that is understood equally by both Business and IT. The language of capabilities. It is like the “lurve” language that both entities can relate to.
When business groups learn to stop asking for technologies and begin describing their future state in terms of capabilities, it frees their IT partners to explore the technical options and arrangements that will be the best fit-for-purpose to suit the business’s needs.
Capability-oriented communications.
Dealing with capabilities can be very helpful because they can be decomposed into more finite levels of granularity that business units can articulate and for IT to understand and run with.
Much like the Rosetta stone, capabilities are fast becoming a much more preferred communications language technique that assists in translation between disparate groups.
Capability maturity modeling was a concept co-developed by Carnegie-Mellon University and the US Department of Defense in the early seventies. Enterprise Capability Taxonomies and Models have featured in the evolution of the Business Architecture sub-discipline of Enterprise Architecture frameworks.
Who can help?
For more information about how you can get help on achieving your best business outcomes, contact me at russell@archispective.com for an exploratory consultation.