“the business”

For many years, IT has been talking about “the business”; how we need to understand “the business”, to achieve alignment with “the business”, to be able to speak the language of “the business”.

In conversation yesterday I had another one of those lightbulb moments: we’ve been speaking about “the business” as some homogenised whole when, in fact, most businesses are made up of a bunch of different tribes, all of whom have their own ways, cultures and languages. The marketers, the sales folk, the accountants, the service people, the researchers and so on. Talking about everyone as if they are ASL the same, and have common bonds and objectives, might be even less productive than pretending they don’t exist at all!

For many years now, in a slightly dull way, I have sold the virtues of data modelling within organisations as a vital (if not the vital) plank of effective IT management. To illustrate why, just take a seemingly simple term like “product” or “customer” and try to understand what it means to different tribes within an organisation. You’ll find many interpretations, some even conflicting, and yet all of them equally valid (but only in the eyes of the beholder).

Successful use of technology within an organisation requires at very least an acknowledgment of such breadth of meaning, and the lumpen term “the business” probably doesn’t help much…