We regularly hear that "there is no such thing as an IT project, only business initiatives." But we do not need to look far to find business initiatives being managed as IT projects.
We always found that it's hard to align the business objectives and the IT investments. Typical business managers see IT as strategically important to future success. But most of them do not understand technology risks. We, the IT-technical people know that IT-related risks are vital to business success – but are clueless by these business people. Why? Because there is little common language between business and IT.
By DEFAULT IT people have many technical ideas and aware about IT risks but hard opening our mouth and speaking or explaining things in simple common language (many PARAMETERS but UNKNOWN DEFINITION).
Those business managers have lack technical facts, unaware of IT risks and only think about profits, profits (VOID ERRORNEOUS SYNTAX, RETURN profit).
Consequently there is DATA TYPE MISMATCH between our explanations and those business managers' objectives.
Therefore our ideas are being ABORT by them.
They will give BAD COMMAND for final decision that welcome some problems (VIRUS) and lead to business failure - SYSTEM BREAKDOWN.
What he is trying to say is that we – the IT-people are lack of communication skills. It is always hard for us to open our mouth and throw our opinions. But those business managers – they love to speak but lack of technical facts. Sometimes we are eager to speak, but difficult to explain things for them to understand. We speak different language.
The fact is IT is liken to an iceberg - only the tip of an iceberg, or the positive impact of its implementation, is visible. This is what those business managers aware. Just under the water line - the gigantic bulk of the iceberg or IT risks is hidden from view. They are unaware of it but we are. Hence, we hardly explain it to them. Often parts of the gigantic iceberg break-off, floating and shatter onto the surface. Likewise fragments of the IT risks could snap-off, hacks and ruins to the initial IT project - caused many problems and conflicts - lead to IT and business failure.
Those business people and audit committees may not have all the skills they need to understand and deal with IT risks, while mechanisms for communicating risks to them may also not be effective enough. My personal opinion says that most IT professionals lack the ability to communicate risk and its potential business impact in a way that the business managers understand.
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... "one of the first things that he and other project leaders did was to collocate 20 business managers with 40 IT workers to help them stay in sync on the project's products and timetables. " ...
... "It’s a huge challenge for IT organizations to stay aligned with the business on projects" ...
... "business managers sometimes fail to grasp what effect IT projects will have on their operations and how much their internal business processes may have to be amended to work with new systems." ...
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After all assessing IT-related risk is a team game. IT professionals are the one who understand the technology. Then again business managers are the one who lack the technical background but could extend the potential business implications. We need to bring together both IT professionals and business managers into one ring and speak the similar plain language to manage IT risks.
SHARING VIOLATION. ACCESS DENIED. ABORT? =)
