Looking at the current state of the art in computing, one could claim that we have come full circle in terms of the use of computing power. A long time ago, computers were large hulking machines used only by system analysts in separate rooms, and the services provided were purely operational – no business intelligence applications at all. Then along came the personal computer, which placed limited computing power in the hands of the business person, as well as workgroup computers that ushered in an era of distributed computing. With a machine on his or her desktop, a business manager could make use of local applications for both operational and intelligence-oriented processing. Applications such as word processors and spreadsheets, made available to a non-programmer, revolutionized the way people did business. However, there was a need for technical support, and the Information Technology department evolved into both a support group as much as a technology review organization, investigating new hardware and applications, etc.

The way that the Information Technology department has evolved has imposed an artificial boundary between those who require computer services and those who provide them. The issue was basically this: Those who could build business applications were not necessarily the best at understanding the business requirements, and those who understood the business requirements were not likely to be programmers. New positions cropped up, such as the IT Liaison, a person who absorbed business desires from the business side and translated those into technical requirements for the IT side. And while the way that these IT personnel were compensated evolved into complicated charge-backs and accounting tricks, it was clear that the division between Business and IT is essentially a budgetary one: IT is a cost center, as opposed to the business units, which are profit centers. But because of this split, there has developed a deeper philosophical division between information technology providers and users that affects the ability to get things done.

Let’s look at an example: At technical conferences, the DBAs and application implementers express dismay at the unavailability of funds to continue project development, while at business-oriented conferences, the attendees are concerned about the inability of the implementers to provide the appropriate support for their business problems. The implementers say, “We want to do such and such an improvement, but our budget has been cut. How can we do this with no additional spending?” The business clients say, “We expected the data warehouse to be online already, but it is a year late and over budget, and still unusable!” The implementers say, “We want to get the project finished, but the requirements keep changing!” The users say, “The business environment continues to change, and what were requirements a year ago when we first planned the project are no longer the same.”