The Intersection of Business and Technology

What does the Intersection of Business and Technology look like?

Is the Intersection a shining Emerald City, where goals, ideas, and feedback are freely shared? Where IT principals understand the business and drive the technology to satisfy the business first, even before designing and deploying Greatest System Ever v10.0? Where business principals are sympathetic to the needs and specifications required for effective IT? Where regular partnership and joint accountability are merely business-as-usual, rather than a rarely-employed practice?

Is the Intersection a tall and wide impenetrable wall, where business goals are not shared, but volleyed back and forth between Business and IT? A place where business principals throw their problems over the wall as they hope and wait for a technology solution – any technology solution - to their operational problems and inefficiencies? Where the business principals rejoice when something – anything - has been thrown back over the wall for the first time in weeks or months? Is what they receive a true solution to their problems, or is it merely what the IT principals dictated as sufficient for the business without the ability or willingness to deliver more?

Is the Intersection a single blinking yellow traffic light, encouraging people to slow down but not stay around long enough to take a good hard look at what is being achieved or what is even possible? Or is the Intersection merely a desolate, unvisited crossroads whose only sign of activity is a tumbleweed traversing in the breeze?

When organizations establish their own Intersections, many treat the process like it is a Burning Man festival – that is to say, an exercise in temporary community. Principals from both Business and IT congregate for a few days to a week - often offsite - where they proclaim cooperation through rigorous presentations and sessions, show off their latest projects and business plans, share meals and shake hands, and then disband. When they return to their places of work, they often end up going back to the same or older practices, procedures, and policies - without making much progress. The partnerships do not survive the offsite event, and the joint accountability never materializes.

What does the Intersection of Business and Technology look like in your organization? How do you want it to look? Do you want merely the synergy of the temporary community without further partnership, the safety and protection from accountability that the impenetrable wall provides, or the shining Emerald City?

However you want the Intersection to look, one thing is certain: much like the Burning Man festival, the Intersection will contain only what you take with you.