The Symbiotic Nature of IT and Business

One of the weird things about IT is that people often talk about the “relationship” between “IT” and “The Business.” The word “relationship,” however accurately describing the circumstances is a bit odd. Rarely do people talk about a “relationship” between “marketing” and “the business.” You don’t describe a relationship between “accounts receivable” and “the business.” That’s because we think of marketing and accounts receivable as parts of the business – and are as inseparable to the business as a human body is to its liver. And it’s rare to say that I have a “relationship” with my liver. (Well, sometimes I have an abusive relationship with my liver.)
But it does seem that IT and “business” are separate somehow. Whether it’s because “business doesn’t get IT culture,” or “IT culture doesn’t get business” doesn’t matter – the two are thought of as separate entities in a relationship with one another. Specifically, they are in a multualistic symbiotic relationship – IT cannot exist without the core business writing the checks, and the core business cannot compete without well performing IT.
Now, we’ve often pointed out that IT needs to be more in tune with business needs, and that there should be more coordination between IT and business. That hasn’t changed. IT functions best when the individuals in IT departments both are aware and can make it known to the C-level executives that they are responsible, in the business, for increasing production and reducing expenses. But the reality is that there is some sort of disconnect, and the recent financial crisis shows part of it.
Because a symbotic relationship means that the two organisms can’t function without each other. So, when business is good, the mood in the IT department is often concerned more over the small details within IT that they have control over - incremental improvements and measuring the relative value of one generation of routers to the next. When business is bad, IT people start to become more concerned with the business.
It’s counterintuitive; but IT teams really need to focus on things the other way around. If business is bad (and I don’t just mean a non-profitable quarter, but when something in the core of the business has fundamentally failed – like we’ve seen with Lehman Brothers and AIG), nothing IT can do at that point can really save it.
It is at the other times – when business is doing well - that IT can have the most impact on the business, by reducing costs and increasing productivity. For example, we laugh about the “irrational exuberance” of the late 1990s dot-com boom, but infrastructure developed during that period helps companies to this day. If I’m recalling correctly, FedEx (and I’m not choosing them for any reason other than it’s the first company I thought of off the top of my head for which this metaphor applies) brought in package tracking infrastructure and electronic sign-in during that period – projects that never would have been approved during the next few years as the boom turned to bust – but which undoubtedly helped FedEx to cut costs during that bust.
If IT really is in a symbiotic relationship with the businesses in which they reside, then at the very least, IT should be doing everything it can to ensure the survival of its symbiotic “partner” in business.
In some cases, IT “survives” the death of the symbotic partner but they do not survive unscathed. The data centers of Lehman Brothers were picked up by Barclays. That may be reason to hope for some of Lehman Brothers IT staff, but the needs of a bank are very different than that of a security trading company – Banks care more about batch-processing – being able to store ultra-large queues and the power to process them, while securities trading companies on ultra-fast network speeds to make trades using the FIX protocol.