IT Alignment Dialog - Failure Factor #3

This is perhaps the most frequent and the most controversial of the failure factors we have uncovered in the last 25 years.

Failure reason #3: Managerial, cultural and attitudinal roadblocks.

While both business and IT prefer the view that all IT issues can be resolved with a technical solution, the truth is unfortunately very different. Most of reasons for failure of IT and business to align are not technical in nature. Primarily they revolve around territorial issues, management capability, management resistance, attitudes, and/or cultural conflicts such as:

1. The things we need to do are too hard, take too long, don't know how, too risky, not my job, don't have authority
2. We don't need to do anything because we are aligned (our data show that 90% are not and 10% are only partially)
3. Don't want or fear of a report card
4. The IT and business managers have relationship issues (personality or cultural) and can't/won't work as a team
5. Territorial -- Fear that sharing information will result in loss of power, influence, etc.
6. Business managers do not believe IT can execute even if funding is adequate
7. Business and IT managers want a one-shot, silver-bullet, forever fix (Not going to happen)

In the past, unfortunately, IT and business had an adversarial rather rather than a team relationship. The fault in the past was on both sides. IT professionals harbored a deep (but unspoken) set of beliefs that they "knew best" because for several decades only they could use and understand the computer. Business managers resented their dependency.

The state of technology is now such that everyone has a "working" knowledge of computers and systems. Therefore, business managers want to take back control -- but, they can never be IT specialists enough to avoid disasters.

Alignment requires both IT and business to work together as seamlessly as marketing and sales, finance and operations, etc. IT cannot and should not operate in a vacuum -- business cannot and should not design IT projects. Teaming together, IT can bring the best solution to the business manager's projects to maximize efficiency, effectiveness, and success.

In short, in today's world there is no room for these problems. If they exist, they need to be identified and rectified. If the problems are cultural or personality conflicts -- bring them into the open and bridge or resolve them. If the problems are managerial, territorial, or attitudinal -- resolve or replace people. If doing the work to get aligned is too hard etc, get help to do it or get over it.

What are your thoughts, experience, stories.....