Clearly, what we like to refer to as the “IT Side” and the “Business Side” have aligned themselves in an adversarial manner. This is hammered home by the fact that the IT question I most frequently heard was not about any kind of technical issue, but was some version of “How can I convince my business partner to fund my project?”

On the other side, there is another interesting phenomenon that I have noticed as well over the past few years, and that is the growing knowledge overlap between the IT and Business sides. As business units and IT groups grow their relationships, we find that the IT side gradually learns more and more about how the business works, and the business side has a growing understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the technology. Those involved are becoming members of a new corps of organizational being, the business technology strategist. And as we seek to integrate all that data from the distributed workgroup systems, we are starting to see emerging technologies for collaboration and information exchange and sharing on scales unimaginable thirty years ago.

What I have found through my conversations is that the most successful projects are those where the two sides have laid down their arms and forged a working relationship. The business people now know how the hardware and software works, and the technologists document and learn more about business process modeling and how those processes can be encapsulated within an operational system. This is a growing knowledge management trend that reflects the need for a deeper understanding of how to exploit data and technology to gain a competitive edge.

One aspect of this trend is the abstraction of the business process in a way that enables a quick system implementation of that business process. New ideas such as business rule management, workflow analysis, classification and segmentation, and business process modeling are all parts of this trend - expect to see a growth of these kinds of applications. These applications effectively provide a way to formalize and document the rules associated with the way a business process works, and provide a means for operationalizing those rules. A corollary effect is that when system implementations are defined with precision and accuracy, the overall development process becomes more streamlined and easier to outsource. Unfortunately, the impact of this last issue in the United States has been that application development can be outsourced to other countries, where developer costs are much lower. While systems are being developed at lower cost overseas, the burden of innovation shifts from the programmer to the business technology strategist.