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is not so simple. There are many challenges involved, given the long-standing
gap between business and IT, which makes it difficult to align IT invest-
ments and efforts with business strategy.
This gap is a result of years of disconnected strategies from IT and busi-
ness areas inside organizations. Despite the efforts to deal with this prob-
lem through the formulation of IT strategic plans, promoting executive
meetings, increasing the CIO's (chief information officer) presence on the
boards, and use of IT governance frameworks, the problem persists. It is
not an easy task to align what sometimes represents different interests
even inside the same company. Harmonizing IT strategies with business
strategies, making decisions about what is necessary for business and IT,
executing plans within time and budget, and balancing IT investments
among interested areas are some of the difficulties for the alignment.
This gap arises in great part due to the communication barriers that
exist between IT and non-IT people in organizations. People from IT tend
to have a technical background and use a language unfamiliar to business
people. For example, thinking about some commonly used IT acronyms,
ECM, ERP, CRM, SOA, VPN, PKI, OLAP, among many others, is possible
to state that people from IT know the meaning of these awkward words,
but we cannot say the same about people from the business side. The ter-
minology used in IT is so vast that it is very difficult, even for the experi-
enced CIO, to know about all of the terms. On the other hand, depending
on the business area, it is quite possible to have similar issues with spe-
cific technical jargon used by business professionals that are unknown to
IT people. Another source of conflict that contributes to the gap between
IT and business comes from the need to balance IT investments among
the company areas following business demands. How to decide what is the
priority for the company's success or determining if it is better to invest
in IT to support what exists, or to invest in business growth, can create
internal tensions within a company.
To reduce the gap between business and IT, it is essential that technical
and nontechnical people share a common knowledge base and learn to
collaborate effectively in spite of their differences.
When this doesn't occur, organizations end up focusing mostly on data
capture, production, and storage while devoting little attention to the use
of information and deriving value from it. In other words, the focus is
not on the “information” but on the “technology” part of IT. Deriving
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