Walls Within

Corporate America is an interesting place. An organization can have a goal - a mission statement, a "vision." This is defined as "strategy." This strategy defines the organization to outsiders, shareholders, and basically the general public.

In theory, every element within that organization is contributing to that vision. It's easier for people actually in-line with the industry of that organization (engineers for an engineering firm, or perhaps scientists for a life sciences company) to quantify their contributions to that strategy. But what about those of us in the service sector?

Analysts link technology to business. They link IT, Quality, and Development together. Once those links have been formed, engineers, technicians and support specialists keep them maintained. It is the burden of the analysts to ensure that the needs of the business are met by the capabilities of technology.

What technology do you choose? How is it applicable? Does it fit in with the organization's current infrastructure? Overwhelming questions, perhaps, but sound more complicated than they truly are. The key to solving all of these is communication. Communication, most of all, with the people who are ultimately going to be using the technology. It's one thing to pitch the technology to an audience who is administering it - but it's absolutely a different beast to pitch the technology to someone who will be using it every day. It's never an all or nothing and it should never be a mystic process.

IT is never the only stakeholder in a technology implementation. It is the death of an IT organization when it begins to have its own agenda in a company that can easily outsource those services. As such, an IT organization that builds walls around itself and within itself to its own functional areas is doomed to fail.

I often wonder what phenomenon brings about these walls - is it management, is it culture, or is it simply something wild allowed to grow if not cut down every now and then. Regardless, I think it's very common - especially in the IT field - to have these walls for the sake of job security and knowledge hoarding.