Skip to main content

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

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

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

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...