Business & IT working relationships: unreasonable expectations or overpedantic ones f

Neon_Lights

Have had a few experiences of this this week... it had me thinking I would like views on how the business can create symbiotic as opposed to frictional relationships with IT.... any experiences or suggestions below

Ray Palmer

Not sure what you are asking.

It seems to be you are saying business users are not happy with the IT department being fussy about requirements.

If that is the case it is an example of users not understanding their own requirements. If you want a piece of IT work done you have to be very precise and users find that frustrating. The problem being you need somebody to have a foot in both sides who mediates and does up business specs. It depends on what kind of software development process you use.

Standard arguments are
User "I want it to work"
IT"What way"
User "You know so it process this"
IT " What way do you want it to do? Do you need it to save incompletes, do you need to be able to delete incorrect records, do you need an audit trail etc..."
User "Just make it work, have you no idea what we do?"

Then repeat

Gone West

Generally it comes down to security vs usability vs end user education.
"IT" can't be just us versus them.
It sounds like you need technical business analysts, upskill non technical people, develop more user friendly systems, or just hire talented engineers to interface and remediate.

micosoft

I'd fix the title to your post OP because it's set a tone that's frankly not helpful to the genuine and difficult question as to how internal IT remains relevant to the organisation it sits in. There have been a couple of posts recently on CIO.com and ZDNET which illustrate the dramatic shift in the relationship between internal IT and "the business" (which itself is a terrible starting point). IT is too important to be left to the IT bods and great alternatives exist to using the inhouse guys. Why install CRM when you can use Salesforce and have a couple of dev's in your business unit. Far more flexible.


A key thing here is the trusim that people overestimate the initial impact of technology and underestimate the long term. The cloud is going to hit everyone including the infrastructure guys.

So here's my advice -
- Stop thinking about the likes of ITIL. Only purpose to my mind of implementing ITIL is to easily outsource the function. On the other hand sticking ITIL change request forms on front of the org just enrages it and makes it want to figure out alternatives.
- Let go and accept the organisation will bypass IT for many services it uses. Don't attempt to block it. Figure out instead how you can act as a broker to enable it and add value to the outsourced/cloudy piece.
- Focus on moving from an order taker to a businss parter to being part of the organisations mission. That means dropping everything generic and only doing what adds value to the organisation. That means reinventing how people work in IT, how they view their career paths etc. It means spending time looking at what the organisation does and figuring out solutions before being asked. It means asking to be involved in strategy meetings, attending department meetings to just listen in and understand the pain points. It means being part of the business not outside it.

Ultimately the IT world is changing faster then most IT departments are adopting - my personal feeling is that there will be a huge shakeout shortly in inhouse IT.

Ray Palmer

OP you need to comment on what is being said as how your organisation works is key to get useful information. Talk of ITIL is a very specific development and organisational thing for example. Mean while you may be doing just talking about network support guys and occasional batch jobs.

At the moment nobody can really comment in a useful manner

beauf

Neon_Lights wrote: »

Have had a few experiences of this this week... it had me thinking I would like views on how the business can create symbiotic as opposed to frictional relationships with IT.... any experiences or suggestions below

As the others have said you need better people in the middle. UX and business analysts, with experience in business (ideally in the specific business) and considerable IT experience. Outsourcing and cloud based systems aren't always the answer. A lot of places try this, then end up bringing it all back in house again.

Mrs OBumble

If anyone can think of a more appropriate forum for this, then please let us know. (I'd happily subscribe to such a forum, just haven't spotted it anywhere on boards.ie yet).