I agree that there has traditionally been a rift between the IT department and the rest of most organizations. But in my personal experience it’s always been because the business planners entertain sales men from various corporations before making hardware and software purchases, then hand it to the IT folks and tell them to ‘make it work’.

Perhaps the rift originally developed because of the vastly different personality types between business professionals and your run of the mill computer geek. And I realize that trouble communicating makes matters worse. You say ‘Computer’, I say ‘2Duo E4500 2.20 Gigahertz, 250 Gig HD and 3 Gigs of Ram Work Station’

But we’re not trying to be difficult!! We’re trying to be helpful. :-)

In my experience we ‘geeks’ are more than capable and would love a chance at giving some educated advice when it comes to future planning and budgeting. Just don’t turn your ears or your minds off when our techno-babble makes you anxious. Be patient and ask us to explain and we’d be happy too! We aren’t scary, we’re just… different. :-)

Now I am doing the same type of job but it is officially part of the business side of the house, part geek and part business, like a liaison between the two. This is the reason so many organizations now have a CIO - Corporate Information Officer.

In response to James above, he is correct, one of the hardest things was convincing IT that I still need access to all of the systems I had when I was under the IT umbrella. Just because I report to a business leader now I am doing the same job and need the same system and administrative privileges, and it always took a while to make that happen. They must have thought I was a traitor! :) So there were times in the past we got the servers and did it ourselves just to get the job done.

Some of this comes back to being self-defined as an organization. For us, it means knowing who we are in Christ and what our God-given purpose is, then letting that guide all things in our ministry, including technology. It’s why we got into blogging on staff, it’s why we got into video production, it’s why we invested in a church database: To help us be effective in reaching people for Christ.

Very interesting…and cool. It would be a trip to be a part of helping the church shape the web culture in the coming years. To see such a dramatic change in the way humans communicate in our lifetimes is a treat. Let’s just hope we don’t screw eachother up in the process.

What you are talking about has been happening for over 10 years in the corporate world. These business-focused IT guys used to be known as the MIS dept. These were the guys that took orders from the business people, and with some level of understanding used technologies such as PowerBuilder, VB, or MS Access to extract data and build simple interfaces to existing systems.

While it is still common is the larger corporations to see an MIS dept, most often these people were replaced with IT leaders that could bridge the gap between technology and business while still keeping the overall IT strategy in mind.

The primary problem with the MIS crowd is that they would circumvent the standard IT practices, creating copies of copies of copies of important databases, fragmenting the IT strategy. They don’t do this intentionally - they do it out of the need to make quick decisions and lack of proper support from within IT to get things to the quickly.

So, yes, I agree with the article that it will important for IT to understand the business and to be business-driven whenever possible. But it will require a more thorough interview process to ensure that the right people exist in these positions to balance both the IT strategy and the business direction. As the article says, it will be harder to find those kind of people.

Thankfully, many of the recent patterns, such as using REST when architecting IT systems, are enabling systems to become more open without requiring the old MIS approaches.