Is IT part of the business?

How many times have you seen words to the effect of – ‘the business and IT’?

For example:

‘we need to get the business and IT to work more effectively together’
‘we need better business and IT alignment’

I was reading an interesting blog today it contained a diagram that had the business on one side and IT on the other.

It got me thinking – in any of the above – would you replace the word ‘IT’ with another business unit?

Would you say ‘the business and Sales’? HR? Finance? Marketing? Research etc etc?

If not – why do we treat IT as a special case? Why do we use language that effectively treats IT as a separate entity from ‘the business’?

Does using language like this lead to a mindset which creates barriers within an enterprise?

Like this:

One blogger likes this post.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 21:25 and is filed under Enterprise architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to Is IT part of the business?

Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen says:

2010/03/02 at 07:47

I’m with you 100 % Michael. Silly IT centric way of dividing a company and the people within into two pots.

Reply
IT and the rest of the business « Michael Baylon's blog says:

2011/03/19 at 09:51

[...] and the rest of the business In a previous blog Is IT part of the business? I raised the issue of our common use of language eg ‘IT and the business’ that makes a [...]

Reply
Tear Down This Wall! « Liliendahl on Data Quality says:

2011/08/13 at 11:13

[...] I disagree. So do many other people as for example Michael Baylon in this blog post called Is IT part of the business? [...]

Reply