Intelligent Enterprise

Better Insight for Business Decisions

RSS
Webcasts
Whitepapers
Subscribe
Home

July 18, 2003

Divided Loyalties No Longer

The old dichotomy pitting business needs against IT needs is going the way of the punch card

by Joshua Greenbaum

The idea that the roles of business user and IT manager are at odds is one of the truisms of the enterprise software market. Every software product has the business/IT dichotomy built right into its functionality: User-friendly screens are for the business user, systems management screens are for the IT manager. The same is true on the sales and marketing side: Business users are sold software based on "high-level" return on investment (ROI) and business use cases, while IT managers are told that the new product is either the best technology the world can offer (the predot-com-meltdown pitch) or the best fit for the existing technology infrastructure (the new, more pragmatic, postdot-com leveraging pitch).

As with most truisms, this one is ripe for a change.

Regardless of how familiar or comfortable this dichotomy may be, my recent conversations with CIOs and business users have convinced me that it's going the way of the punch card. The shift won't happen overnight, but there are a lot of good reasons why the old business vs. IT battleground will never look the same.

Who Will Hold the Purse Strings?

One of the biggest casualties will be the theory that the software buying decision is permanently shifting away from the IT manager in favor of the business user. IT has been told to trim costs and leverage what's already there, while business users are said still to be able to buy software — albeit with serious limits on how much can actually be spent — as long as the software provides a demonstrable ROI for a specific, and troublesome, business problem.

Before I proceed, let me note that I will always believe that enterprise software has to be sold with a solid business case and an even more solid technology case. And I still recommend that any vendor that can't do both should be shown the exit, politely to be sure. But the notion that IT management has no interest in business issues, and business users have no concern for technology matters is just that: a notion, one that's slowly losing legitimacy in the face of rapidly changing business and technology realities.

This shift is in part a self-fulfilling prophecy that can be traced to the age-old influence of power and money. As technology spending slows across the board, the scramble to own the buying decision is becoming more acute. Business managers have been given a lot of leeway in the buying decision, but don't think IT management hasn't noticed. There's an old saw that claims the reason academic politics are so cutthroat is because the stakes are so small. It works at the corporate IT level as well: As the technology spending pie shrinks, players and would-be players are looking for whatever advantage they can find. That means IT management has to look and smell more like business management than ever before.

Don't think IT managers are just staging a cynical ploy to hoodwink their management into letting them continue to own a significant chunk of the technology buying decision. I recently chaired a two-day conference of European CIOs and walked away with the clear understanding that these 50-or-so men and women considered themselves first and foremost business managers or executives. No matter that there wasn't a line-of-business manager in the room: Every CIO pledged allegiance to the fact that business requirements, not technology, had to be the rationale for technology acquisition ... and that they were well-positioned to define those business requirements for their companies.