Perpetuating the IT, business divide: an insider’s perspective

As an active participant inside the South African SME IT industry for 20 years, I feel that I am allowed to reflect on how this industry goes about doing business, warts and all! And to me it is clearly time we as the industry implement real change, as the status quo is no longer relevant to modern business requirements.

Although I feel strongly that a dramatic paradigm shift is required, I am not trying to paint the industry in a bad light. I am passionate about technology and the immense impact that its implementation has had on how we do business day to day – it is my chosen field of work after all.

And as much as we need to refocus, I am recognising that people within the industry work extremely hard and try their very best to ensure that business expectations are met. It is, however, time to look up from the grindstone, take a few steps back and look at the bigger picture. My arguments in this article are not intended as a slap in the face, but more a splash of cold water bringing into sharp relief the fact that the times have changed, and we need to change with them or become irrelevant.

Major challenges

There are a lot of articles that state how companies fail to align IT with business strategy , but most of these do focus on the company-internal dynamics and shortcomings. Here are some of the more prevalent problems which the IT industry (vendors, consultants, etc.) continues to perpetuate today, but which need attention if our chosen field of expertise is to become a truly strategic business resource.

IT sells technology to business based on a list of features and usage scenarios which look very impressive on paper, but are virtually never mapped to genuine business outcomes and therefore seldom produce the actual business benefits expected. As IT people we sell innovative technology rich with potential business benefits, while the business wants innovative solutions which deliver these business benefits right out the box.

Despite pitches full of promises, IT providers then often deal with their customers with a classic supplier mindset. Rather than the appropriate consultative process and time expended getting to know the customer business in order to build precisely the solution each needs, a pre-packaged solution is sold, implemented, and left to the customer to fully exploit. These providers deliver the technology the business wants, but don’t turn that technology deployment into the solution that the business needs.

Although this cookie-cutter approach has its merits and is often rightfully veiled behind valid observations of “best practices” and efficient technology deployment models, at the end of the day the old saying applies that to a carpenter who only has a hammer in his toolbox, everything looks like a nail. Even though it’s obvious that an accurately measured and neatly finished supporting beam requires much more than a good solid strike with a heavy object.

I fully understand, particularly in a commissions-dominated sales environment, how this approach is appealing to the technology vendors. Sales people want their customers to sign on the most comprehensive solution available in their baskets to earn the maximum commission from the deal and at the current profit margins we have driven each other to, nobody can afford a long sales cycle.

Even more devastating is the fact that the beautiful brochures, impressive proposals and promises delivered to clients out of the box have led to a situation where clients are not willing to pay for experienced consultants to assess the needs if the competition does all this seemingly “for free”. We in the IT industry have with this approach inadvertently undermined our own credibility.

Pushing back

There’s little wonder that today many businesses are pushing back. This model yields costly technology deployments which fail to deliver the desired benefits, costing the company revenue without aligning IT and business and ever improving their processes or eventual outcomes. As well as mapping new technology to the business requirements, it’s also critical that the company culture is taken into account and solutions are customised for a holistic fit.

Further exacerbating the frustration felt by business with IT is that almost every technology provider claims to offer full-spectrum solutions, but most are specialists only either in providing a stable, standardised platform or a very narrow area of expertise. This leaves the customer, which in SMEs in particular often lack that unicorn of an IT manager who is capable of pulling all the pieces together themselves, looking for additional partners to fill in the blind spots. Generally the business leaders themselves are left struggling to understand how each piece of the puzzle fits together, and the multi-supplier approach never results in a holistic IT approach.

Budgeting becomes a mechanical exercise of examining the previous budget and identifying where costs can be cut and then adding a few, often incoherent initiatives and projects. This uninspired approach is then dubbed an IT strategy , although to the business “strategy” refers to the process of looking into the future and setting in place plans to achieve these objectives over a 5 to 10-year period.

Transparency is also definitely not synonymous with IT vendors, who are traditionally poor communicators since the nature of the work is such that direct answers are often not easily understood. Unless the client itself makes a specific request, IT teams are often content to remain silent, giving the impression that a proactive approach to IT is a luxury, rather than an accepted norm for effective implementation.

Align business and IT

Today these challenges to the business value of IT have been recognised for a number of years, and in fairness we are not the only IT solutions provider to be trying to change these perceptions. There are many organisations who have shifted to becoming real trusted technology advisors to their clients, however until now there has been no widely-accepted methodology for ensuring this result. Additionally others have jumped on the bandwagon and the term “trusted advisor” has started appearing in the brochure ware and standardised proposals I talked about above.

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This article by Mathias Tölken originally appeared on Spaceage.co.za and is republished with permission.