This book addresses a crisis of communication so entrenched and intractable that many people cease to notice it anymore. When business and Information Technology people sit down at a table to solve problems and build new solutions, the outcome is rarely pretty and often the process can be downright unpleasant. Often, what a solution should do for the business is described in the broadest strokes. How that solution might be implemented is described in microscopic detail. This book explains how to bridge that gap, so that comprehensive communication leads to better solutions.
It turns out that communicating about technology is much harder than anyone ever realized. The development and use of a wide range of technologies that we collectively describe as Information Technology or “IT” has, over some forty years, changed unimaginably, not just its technical capabilities, but in its role and relationships to business and people as well.
In reality, the use of the term “IT” to describe the technology used by people in business today is out of date. When asked, most people would name the improvements in communication, together with the introduction of the Web, as the most significant changes in recent years, and neither was recognized or included in the origination of the term “IT” in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The term ICT, standing for Information and Communications Technology, is perhaps more representative, but even that fails to adequately convey the way people relate to and use the various forms of technology now available at work or at home.
If we have trouble with defining the scope and terminology of the topic at this fundamental level, the issues business and IT departments face when working together to provide solutions that the business really wants are even more overwhelming. At the fundamental level, the need to understand the critical business needs, and indeed, what IT can practically deliver, is paramount-but do we have the capability to achieve this? It is the rare company that can claim consistent success in crafting IT to meet business needs. We think communication is at the heart of this inconsistency. Currently, technology product vendors are rising to the challenge of providing new capabilities, but there has yet to be a corresponding elevation of the thinking process of how to design, implement and manage these products to deliver business outcomes in the connected world. In one respect, the increasing interest and focus on “architecture” is a reflection of this need to approach solutions in a methodical way, starting with the business requirement. But from a more behavioural perspective, traditional IS/IT architecture fails to provide the full answer. This is probably due to its engineering roots and the more recent gravitational pull of IT advancements.
Increasingly, businesses-and therefore the systems of business-are both “loosely coupled” and provide “any-to-any” re-combinations, often with some part of the value chain or IT solution external to an enterprise and therefore not under its control. We are lacking the language to describe this world that works both for “the business” and “IT.” People will recognize in VPEC-T elements that apply to both the business requirements-definition process and the application of technology; but its real value lies in how business and technology aspects are brought together to make a cohesive, simplified and yet comprehensive approach to the entire problem.
Andy Mulholland
Global CTO, Capgemini