I'm not sure if folks took note of the Wall Street Journal article, "How to Tap IT's Hidden Potential" from March 10th.  Interestingly, I just had a conversation with some IT customers on the question "Is IT a core business of my company?"  Opinion was split between yes and no - "yes" because a company cannot function in the current environment without IT and it is a source of innovation and improvement for the company, and "no" because without the business itself there would be no need for IT (IT is just a supporting organization in the enterprise).

The WSJ article argues these same points and concludes "that CEOs can't ignore IT and expect to succeed. Technology has accelerated the pace of change in business, making it crucial for companies to detect, assess and respond to every opportunity and every threat as quickly and as effectively as possible.  And that kind of agility can only be achieved by fully embracing the operational and strategic importance of IT."  The article goes on to give several steps for bringing IT and business closer together.  Briefly, they are that:

• The business' CEO and executive board understand IT as well as they understand "accounting, finance and marketing"
• The CIO not just be technically focused but understand how IT and the various aspects of the company's business can be integrated (and then actively works at this)
• Executives rotate through IT, and IT personnel integrate with the business units
• All managers understand the values that IT brings to the business ("knowledge management, business intelligence, information security, change management and process integration")
• People be able to translate IT and business concepts - so that "nothing gets lost in the translation"
• IT spending be analyzed against business value, and risks and returns fully evaluated

Whereas many of these steps deal with changing business processes and increasing understanding, there is one item that begs for tooling - being able to translate IT and business concepts. In my interpretation of this, it is important for IT to decrease the focus on technology and its "fads", and increase the focus on what the business needs.  At one level, being able to mine a database for business data and/or infer new facts from existing data are critical - and whether the database is a relational, an XML, a triple or an object-oriented store is secondary and left to the interested reader to pursue.  Oftentimes, we technology folks put the focus on the implementation and not the bsuiness. I would argue that the implementation doesn't really matter (and could/should be changed based on understanding risks and rewards) as long as the business gets the answers that it needs in a timely manner. 

Now, on the business side, there is a need to formally capture and "debug" business vocabularies, rules, processes and related data to improve their quality, and decrease the communication mismatch between the business and IT.  For example, tooling can take business vocabularies and create relational or object-oriented models, or XML schemas, that are more natural forms of communication for computer-inclined personnel. And, business rules and processes are captured today - although usually in arcane and obscure computer languages that mean nothing to the business people. There could be a two-way translation between a business person's natural language and these rules and processes. What a concept!

I know that people are working to change this. :-)

Andrea