Interesting to read about your experience. As someone who thinks of himself as well over 15% geek/nerd, I used to identify myself with the denizens of Slashdot.

Until I got Slashdotted.

The first thing that came to mind was a Chinese proverb: ‘Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.’

In fact, my publisher told me to pay them no mind. Odd, isn’t it– to be published and yet be ignored?

However, there was an upside in that many people themselves eschewed the Slashdot forum and went right to the source. I received countless emails and even phone calls from people who responded positively and had something to say in return.

I’m not sure Slashdot is really an example of broken communication between suits and nerds as it is a reflection of people badly wanting to be heard.

Speaking about your HBR article though, I believe it is a fairly good summary of all the issues met between IT and business departments; the details you give on the adoption issue are especially important and should be the cornerstone of any significant IT project. I believe though that you understated some important points:

1) As you concluded (too) quickly, the value IT (and particularly “EIT”) is not within technology and software, it lies within the way all technology pieces are chosen and put together to support or enhance business process. This also implies a high degree of accountability for the CIO. Putting pieces of software side to side is fine on your PC, but it doesn’t make an information system with business value, whatever the value of the individual pieces.

2) In many organizations, IT is easy to point out whenever internal process aren’t efficient. Simply because in information-oriented industries, IT lies in the middle of the company: it is the focal point of all activities as it ensures the flow of information. Hence a lack of sponsorship for IT (starting with the CIO not being a member of the executive committee) will hide necessary process’ improvments, sooner or later. Hence the level of accountability of IT is a major organisational issue in my opinion; probably higher than for most departments has IT is deemed to run entreprise-wide process.

3) Finally IT (or rather “IS”, for information systems) can be divided “vertically” into FIT, NIT and EIT as you did. But from a communication perspective I think it shall be viewed more “horizontally”:
- business process: the CIO should not be the main business advisor on end to end process. He or she should create and lead committees such as the BPOC you spoke about. A well run IT is the place within the company where anyone can get a transversal view of the company’s process. It also implies that IT should be able to handle that, hence being able to listen to and understand business issues from most departments within the company. It also implies to bring value to the company’s managers, through performance indicators based on the business process.

- technology advisor: detect opportunities, bring new ideas and opportunities to the business (ex: impact of RFID and what’s the associated B-case? More complicated: benefits of email when we were back in the early 90′s?). And explain them: you don’t really understand what you can’t explain clearly.

- technical implementation: from technical projects’ management to software integration to development, depending on what is most suited. On that layer you could still make an important differentiation between non critical and critical implementation, from business perspective (ex: a HR tool vs. a factory’s MES), the later requiring a deep understanding of the company’s business.

The whole point is that running IT is not about being a technologist, but about ensuring a company wide coherence of business process, and having the ability to understand and associate both business issues and technology opportunities. And if IT can’t communicate about it, it’s worth nothing!

There is an issue around status that many business people choose to ignore. Yet IT knows it can kill projects any time it likes.

Look at the number of ‘religious’ Oracle, IBM, M$ or SAP shops. Not one of these, you don’t get through the door. Forget common sense, economics or rational decision making.

In other words Andrew, it isn’t just one or the other but both.

Emerging technologies such as Web 2.0 and SOA are changing the way we think about IT, and the old application- and technology-centric approachs to IT solutions are breaking down. IT used to be the hero department, struggling to deliver huge IT assets that would have a dramatic impact on the business (think Wal-Mart’s data warehouse). The future of IT is looking very different as it shrinks and moves to a facilitation role. It seems that a large portion of the IT community is having trouble adapting with these changes and reacting in a negative and defensive manner.

There’s a huge amount of synergy between these technologies and modern business thinking around activity-based models of the business. I expect that companies which successfully leverage this synergy will realise a step-change in their business capabilities, and possibly even the much promised IT-business alignment. I expect the first step toward this goal might be some humility on the part of IT as it admits that the business does actually know what it’s doing, and that there is a lot of valuable insight and thinking in the business community that we (in the IT commmunity) should be leveraging.