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The Disconnect Between IT and the Business

Shayde Christian
Cloudera

IT and the business are disconnected. Ask the business what IT does and you might hear "they implement infrastructure, write software, and migrate things to cloud," and for some that might be the extent of their knowledge of IT. Similarly, IT might know that the business "markets and sells and develops product," but they may not know what those functions entail beyond the unit they serve the most.

The disconnect is understandable because individuals in IT and the business have different skills, training, education, and focus, but it is also surprising in that IT and the business are beyond symbiotic, they are inextricably interdependent. Both teams can take strategic steps to bridge the divide. The first step is atop the building block on which their relationship was founded: data.

Siloed Data and Communication

The common language spoken by IT and the business is data. If data is fragmented, there isn't much to say because departments will only be able to form an isolated, incomplete picture of the business landscape and marketplace. As organizations fail to share data, its value diminishes: valuable insights are difficult to generate and decision-making fails to advance business aims.

Centralizing data ecosystems is critical to break down the silo between IT and the business.

The business must survey a holistic view if they are to accelerate corporate performance, advance strategic goals, and improve customer experience; therefore, IT must aggregate and consolidate disparate data stores onto centralized data platforms, the first step to envision future success through the elusive "single pane of glass."

Industry leading companies leverage modern data architectures to affiliate data silos: data lakehouse, data fabric, and data mesh. Such designs facilitate the effective democratization of data for enterprise-grade insight generation while securing data and appropriately restricting its access. Enterprise data platforms also facilitate proper data governance and improvements in data availability, quality, and integrity. Better data means better decision making.

Disparate Systems and Tools

With aggregated, secure, governed data, IT and the business can foster a culture of collaboration.

Implementation of common systems and tools promotes real-time sharing of information and ideas. Digital transformation initiatives streamline business workflows and multiply actionable data. Investments in intuitive visualization and analytics tools make insights easier to spot.

In addition to fostering collaboration, silo busting, and improving business outcomes, the rallying of IT and the business around digital transformation will cultivate common ground. IT will develop business literacy, and they may feel less like order takers if they are offered a seat at the table. The business will increase data literacy, and they may develop an appreciation for technical complexities and thankless back-office demands.

Misaligned Goals and Objectives

Strong leadership is essential to establish and sustain effective collaboration. Of paramount importance is shared vision. Cross-functional leadership must communicate and align around corporate strategic goals. Everything IT does and delivers should be aligned to established business objectives, and IT should be empowered to decline any requests that are not.

As the business, IT effectiveness should be measured by their contribution to top line and bottom line growth and customer experience. Attribution can be difficult but not impossible. Such tight-knit alignment also strengthens accountability within the business as more effort is applied to estimating the ROI of technology requests before they are submitted to IT. Consequently, innovation will become more intentional, and the business will get more benefit from their shared services organizations.

Objectives alignment is a powerful way to repair the disconnect because it gets IT and the business speaking the same language.

What does the business do?

"They're improving customer experience and efficiency to increase top line growth 15% and profit margins 7%."

What is IT doing?

"Same thing."

Shayde Christian is Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Cloudera

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The Disconnect Between IT and the Business

Shayde Christian
Cloudera

IT and the business are disconnected. Ask the business what IT does and you might hear "they implement infrastructure, write software, and migrate things to cloud," and for some that might be the extent of their knowledge of IT. Similarly, IT might know that the business "markets and sells and develops product," but they may not know what those functions entail beyond the unit they serve the most.

The disconnect is understandable because individuals in IT and the business have different skills, training, education, and focus, but it is also surprising in that IT and the business are beyond symbiotic, they are inextricably interdependent. Both teams can take strategic steps to bridge the divide. The first step is atop the building block on which their relationship was founded: data.

Siloed Data and Communication

The common language spoken by IT and the business is data. If data is fragmented, there isn't much to say because departments will only be able to form an isolated, incomplete picture of the business landscape and marketplace. As organizations fail to share data, its value diminishes: valuable insights are difficult to generate and decision-making fails to advance business aims.

Centralizing data ecosystems is critical to break down the silo between IT and the business.

The business must survey a holistic view if they are to accelerate corporate performance, advance strategic goals, and improve customer experience; therefore, IT must aggregate and consolidate disparate data stores onto centralized data platforms, the first step to envision future success through the elusive "single pane of glass."

Industry leading companies leverage modern data architectures to affiliate data silos: data lakehouse, data fabric, and data mesh. Such designs facilitate the effective democratization of data for enterprise-grade insight generation while securing data and appropriately restricting its access. Enterprise data platforms also facilitate proper data governance and improvements in data availability, quality, and integrity. Better data means better decision making.

Disparate Systems and Tools

With aggregated, secure, governed data, IT and the business can foster a culture of collaboration.

Implementation of common systems and tools promotes real-time sharing of information and ideas. Digital transformation initiatives streamline business workflows and multiply actionable data. Investments in intuitive visualization and analytics tools make insights easier to spot.

In addition to fostering collaboration, silo busting, and improving business outcomes, the rallying of IT and the business around digital transformation will cultivate common ground. IT will develop business literacy, and they may feel less like order takers if they are offered a seat at the table. The business will increase data literacy, and they may develop an appreciation for technical complexities and thankless back-office demands.

Misaligned Goals and Objectives

Strong leadership is essential to establish and sustain effective collaboration. Of paramount importance is shared vision. Cross-functional leadership must communicate and align around corporate strategic goals. Everything IT does and delivers should be aligned to established business objectives, and IT should be empowered to decline any requests that are not.

As the business, IT effectiveness should be measured by their contribution to top line and bottom line growth and customer experience. Attribution can be difficult but not impossible. Such tight-knit alignment also strengthens accountability within the business as more effort is applied to estimating the ROI of technology requests before they are submitted to IT. Consequently, innovation will become more intentional, and the business will get more benefit from their shared services organizations.

Objectives alignment is a powerful way to repair the disconnect because it gets IT and the business speaking the same language.

What does the business do?

"They're improving customer experience and efficiency to increase top line growth 15% and profit margins 7%."

What is IT doing?

"Same thing."

Shayde Christian is Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Cloudera

Hot Topics

The Latest

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...