Many business managers can't get what they want from IT.
Many IT people are working hard - on the wrong thing.

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

May 2006
  1. Always consider IT when defining business plans - not afterwards or not at all.
  2. Use your imagination! What business are you in? Could you develop a new market by using IT? If only the travel agents and music sellers had asked themselves the same question a few years ago.
  3. 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.
  4. Ensure basic IT literacy is the norm among your employees - how can you get value for money out of, say, Microsoft Excel on every work top, if people still add up the figures on a long report sent to them on e-mail with a calculator? Or, order a new sales report to be written for every conceivable sort order.
  5. Encourage and support ideas about how to use IT to improve business processes - from non-IT and IT people.
  6. Encourage "bridgers" - people who are as comfortable with IT as they are with business processes.
  7. 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? In a recent Forrester Business Technographics® survey of North American enterprises, 46% of respondents listed marketing IT as a priority or critical priority.
  8. Make sure IT people see it as part of their job to understand the business.
  9. 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.
  10. Call IT Accessed!