Should Business Learn to Speak The Language of Tech?

Today, heard Neil Holden say something that really struck a chord with me. While discussing an IT vs Business question, he said "IT is the business". This I believe is an excellent and succinct enterprise translation the now famous Mark Andreessen quote from 2011 'Software is eating the world '.

When you look around you, you can see the impact of smart, connected, and software enabled products that surround you, starting with your mobile phone, which has replaced a dozen analog gadgets including flashlights, spirit levels, maps, and wristwatches. But in enterprise technology terms, the landscape is more complex. For example, there are often 4 distinct streams of technology in many businesses. The first is IT, which historically is about keeping connectivity, productivity, and enterprise systems in place and running. Often seen as arcane and nerdy, this stereotype was aptly portrayed in the TV Sitcom 'The IT Crowd'. But most companies have other technologies that also run their businesses - production technologies, SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) tools in factories, eCommerce platforms for retail, broadcast playout, and so on. These are often outside of IT and run as a separate organisation, sometimes referred to as Operations Tech or 'OT'.?Third, you have tech that goes into the product - such as cars, appliances, or even smart meters. Lastly, in recent years, there has been a growth of marketing tech, which in many businesses is directly acquired by marketing teams.

A common and positive trend is that each of these types of technology is moving from erstwhile proprietary and often blackbox models for hardware and software, to much more standard and open systems. Today you would buy a broadcast automation system that will run on a windows server, which would have been unheard of a few years ago. A second trend is that many businesses are now starting to consolidate these towers of technology under a common organisation - because it makes obvious sense to have common governance, data exchange, cyber security, and architectural principles across these areas.

Which brings me to Neil's point. When you add all of this up, you might find that this is where much of the value of your organisation is actually created and captured. From a time when IT was effectively a maintenance job with specialized skills and tools, today it is the at the core of most organisational strategies. No company can hope to scale, make profits, or even survive if it gets its technology wrong. Even if the department is called IT, it's likely that it delivers and supports many of the other three pillars of technology as well.

The language barrier between IT and "the business" is a well documented one. IT organisations have used any number of approaches to ensure that the requirements and business priorities are well translated into technology plans. This has a traditionally spotty success rate given the?track record of many technology projects and programs. But the received wisdom is that IT needs to learn to speak the language of the business. Consequently architects, developers, analysts et al will go out of their way to mask technical jargon and 'dumb down' the technology whilst polishing their ability to understand and speak the jargon of the business instead.

Because every business has its own jargon. In broadcast you might be discussing 'topping and tailing', or 'as run' lists, whereas in consumer goods, you might be talking 'trade promos' and 'uplift'. So my suggestion is that the time has come for business to speak the language of IT. It is no longer acceptable to say 'I don't understand tech'. It isn't okay to be so disconnected from tech that you have to have it dumbed down for you.

Another point on which I have changed my own views: I fell into the technology industry via the internet, with no technical education. So I always tried to play to my strengths and put business first. But of late, I feel that doesn't always work because if you don't understand how tech works and what it can potentially do, you will always end up making marginal improvements to your business, or worse, just codifying how you currently run your business which may be far from optimal.

People who work in IT aren't the basement dwellers with their own lingo, that the stereotype suggests. Both IT organisations and business counterparts need to recognise this.?

#innovation #technology