Steve Jones reminds us that the business doesn’t care about technology – so stop harping about it and using it as an excuse for underperformance.
I totally agree that this is a key reason behind the endemic business/IT culture divide that is the root of many problems.
However this poses an obvious question – who does care about the technology?. The trick is not to over-engineer, but to engineer to just the right level to deliver business value now and into the future.
Somebody has to care about the technology (products, tools, methodologies), because otherwise you lose control and foster a legacy of technical debt which ultimately erodes business value.
I guess this is an axiom of Enterprise Architecture – that lack of governance leads to chaos and inefficiencies. Some would argue with this assertion, but I have never seen a counter-example. And of course the inverse statement is not necessarily true either.
So if the business doesn’t care about technology then who does? And if that is “nobody” then what happens?
