Nine Ways to bridge the gap between business and IT in your organisation.

• Always consider IT when defining business plans - not afterwards or not at all.
• Invite IT to business meetings - they might have some good ideas and they might give you an early warning if any of your ideas need rethinking due to IT opportunities or costs. If nothing else, they are learning about how the business operates which is vital if they are to support it.
• Ensure basic IT literacy is the norm among your employees - how can you get full value for money out of, say, Microsoft Excel on every work top, if your people don't know how to extract, sort and group data?
• Encourage and support ideas about how to use IT to improve business processes - from non-IT and IT people.
• Encourage "bridgers" - people who are as comfortable with IT as they are with business processes.
• Market IT. Encourage a positive attitude to IT in general and make sure IT people are included as valued members of the organisation - what was IT's part in that successful new Sales project?
• Make sure IT people see it as part of their job to understand the business.
• Make sure the reasoning behind "boring", "annoying" policies such as password security and e-mail use are fully explained to all members of the organisation, and that these policies are developed along with non-IT people.
• Call IT Accessed!