Business and Technology Still Struggle to Understand Each Other

I was thinking about this in discussion with some of my colleagues the other day and I think we still struggle to solve the perennial issue of Business and Technology not being aligned.

For every post there is about IT Value, there’s still an issue where I see in many clients that they still struggle to understand each other and understand the same priorities.  In many cases it’s because they come from fundamentally different viewpoints.

The German language has an amazing word called “Weltanschauung”.   It’s simplified as world-view, but encompasses the whole of the shaping of that individual, experientially, emotionally, cognitively, socially etc.  It’s fundamentally, not only the way you look at the world, but the colouring lens that applies on it, where your blind spots are, and where you see things in high-contrast colour.

This is what we see often with business and IT.   I had a client a few years back who had a tech strategy document looking at the most important things that needed to be solved for their product portfolios.  The lead technology architect for each area had listed the top 5-7 things which they felt needed to be addressed in the following year.   What was interesting is when the enterprise “Change Budget” was applied to this view.   It is not an exaggeration to say that the top 5 things in each area which the business was funding in the next year had no commonality with the tech priorities.

Why was this?   I have a view.

This reflects the fact that they have fundamentally different world views and a difficulty in seeing where they in fact are aligned. 

“Because we need to” has not been a valid reason since 2003.   There are two very famous events in the industry which have shown that (among others). 

·      The first event was the Windows XP duration.   Until then, every time the new technology came out, there was a slew of enterprise wide deployments.   After then, we saw businesses saying “yes but what if we just didn’t do the upgrade this year or next year”.  In fact, broadly speaking nothing broke, and actually MS extended their support far beyond the original plan.

·      The second event was SAP HANA and SAP S4 launched in 2015.   There are many many discussions on this topic, but in the end, the reason why the supportability of ECC went from 2023 to 2025, and then 2030 is because fundamentally ECC isn’t broken, it costs a lot of money to switch to S4, and many businesses don't have a view on why that needs to happen.  The pressure from all of the largest global clients to extend was overwhelming.

 There are many more examples, but those are two which "broke the model"

How do we move forward?

Clearly there isn’t an easy/simple answer, otherwise this problem would not exist, but what is interesting is that the actual WORLD inside which these disconnected worldviews exist is now changing, and it will help increase the BizTech worldview intersect above.

·      GenAI:  This is a societal (not simply technological) transformation which impacts business and tech massively.    For every business which is being massively disrupted, (Tax/Audit/Marketing/Cust Svc/Creative/Product development…. […]), there is a similar massive disruption happening in tech (documentation, code engineering, testing, analysis, optimisation, data, security […]) This is a forcing factor whose pull will drag BizTech closer together.

·      Global macro factors:  With 50% of the world changing governments this year, interest rates reflecting uncertainty, political/military threats and escalations, consumer and corporate confidence is highly impacted, leading to massive pressure on enterprises to grow, or defend, or even survive.   Faced with these existential headwinds, then Biz and Tech are being pushed closer together, ignoring the things which are nice-to-have, and focussing on the things which secure EBITDA.

There is hope.