Building Shared Understanding and Trust Between Business and IT

The foundation of any effective business-IT partnership is shared understanding and mutual trust. Without these elements, attempts at collaboration will falter regardless of processes or structures. In the second part of our series on bridging the business-IT gap, we provide concrete approaches to create this foundation based on proven practices from high-performing organizations.

Conduct Business Context Deep Dives

According to “Winning Together,” technology leaders must go beyond surface-level business knowledge and develop true fluency in the business context. This means conducting structured deep dives into:

Market Analysis: Flow Engineering suggests creating visual maps of your competitive landscape, identifying not just direct competitors but also adjacent players and potential disruptors. Map their strengths, weaknesses, and trajectories.

Customer Journey Mapping: Work with business colleagues to document the end-to-end customer experience. Be sure to identify pain points, moments of delight, and opportunities for improvement that technology could address.

Financial Model Understanding: Technology leaders should understand revenue streams, cost structures, and profitability drivers. As “Winning Together” notes, “If you cannot explain how technology investments connect to financial outcomes, business leaders will see technology as a cost center rather than a value driver.”

Practical Action: Schedule monthly sessions where business leaders teach technology leaders about specific aspects of the business model, competitive landscape, or customer needs. Reciprocate with sessions where technology leaders explain technical concepts relevant to business strategy.

Create Shared Mental Models

Research from Dr. Nicole Forsgren and colleagues cited in Accelerate shows that high-performing organizations deliberately build shared mental models between business and technology teams.

Joint Value Stream Mapping Sessions: Bring cross-functional teams together to visually map how work flows from idea to customer value. Flow Engineering provides a structured approach:

• Map the current state with all stakeholders present.
• Identify wait states and bottlenecks together.
• Measure flow time and flow efficiency.
• Identify improvement opportunities that matter to both business and technology.

Visualization of Dependencies: Create visual representations of technical and business dependencies. These visualizations expose hidden constraints and help both business and technology leaders make better decisions about prioritization and sequencing.

Shared Language Development: Intentionally create a common vocabulary. “Winning Together” suggests creating a shared glossary of terms where business and technology concepts are explicitly connected.

Practical Action: Conduct a half-day value stream mapping workshop with equal representation from business and technology. Ensure the workshop produces a large visual that can be displayed in common areas to reinforce the shared understanding.

Establish Psychological Safety

Dr. Ron Westrum’s research, cited in “How to Thrive in Building a Learning Culture,” demonstrates that high-performing organizations cultivate psychological safety. Leaders must actively create environments where both business and technology professionals feel safe to:

Express Concerns Early: “Measuring Leadership” shows that organizations where people can raise concerns without fear of blame detect and solve problems much earlier.

Admit Knowledge Gaps: When business leaders can admit they don’t understand technical concepts, and technology leaders can admit they don’t understand business implications, it creates space for genuine learning.

Challenge Assumptions: Both groups need to feel empowered to question long-held assumptions without it being seen as resistance or lack of team spirit.

Practical actions from “How to Thrive in Building a Learning Culture” include:

• Leaders modeling vulnerability by admitting their own knowledge gaps.
• Celebrating “learning moments” where mistakes led to important insights.
• Ensuring that messengers of bad news are rewarded, not punished.
• Creating explicit space for questions and concerns in all meetings.

Create Transparency Through Visual Management

Flow Engineering emphasizes that visibility creates trust. When work, progress, and impediments are visible to everyone, suspicion is eliminated and opportunities for collaboration are created.

Visible Work Boards: Create physical or digital boards that show the flow of work from concept to customer, making status, blockers, and dependencies visible to all.

Information Radiators: Display key metrics in common areas where both business and technology teams can see them. “Winning Together” suggests including both technical metrics (like deployment frequency) and business metrics (like customer adoption) side by side.

Decision Records: Document key decisions, including the context, options considered, and rationale. This creates transparency about why certain paths were chosen and builds trust in the decision-making process.

Practical Action: Create dashboards that display both technical and business metrics side by side, updated in real-time. Position these in areas where both business and technology teams will see them regularly.

Build Relationships Through Structured Interactions

“Measuring Leadership” highlights how formal and informal interactions between business and technology teams build the relationships necessary for trust.

Regular Gemba Walks: Business leaders physically visiting technology teams (and vice versa) to observe work in progress, ask questions, and offer help.

Cross-Functional Communities of Practice: Creating forums where business and technology professionals can share knowledge and solve problems together.

Job Shadowing and Rotations: Temporary assignments where business people work within technology teams and technology people work within business units.

Joint Problem-Solving Sessions: Bringing mixed teams together to tackle specific challenges, leveraging diverse perspectives.

Practical Action: Implement a monthly “Day in the Life” program where business and technology staff shadow each other for a full day, followed by a debrief session to share insights and identify collaboration opportunities.

Case Study: Building Trust at American Airlines

“Winning Together” shares how American Airlines transformed the relationship between business and technology teams:

1. They began by having both business and technology leaders explicitly acknowledge their past challenges and frustrations.
2. They conducted joint value stream mapping exercises to create a shared understanding of the end-to-end delivery process.
3. They established a clear “definition of awesome” that spoke to both business and technology aspirations.
4. They implemented visual management tools that made progress and impediments visible to everyone.
5. They created regular forums for honest feedback and continuous improvement.

Within a year, this approach not only improved the technical metrics (deployment frequency increased by 70%) but also dramatically improved business outcomes (customer satisfaction increased by 20%) and team morale.

The true foundation of business-IT partnership isn’t found in processes or tools, but in the shared understanding and trust between people. By deliberately building this foundation through the practices outlined above, you create the conditions for deeper collaboration and joint ownership of outcomes, which we’ll explore in Part 3 of this series.

- About The Authors

Leah Brown

Managing Editor at IT Revolution working on publishing books and guidance papers for the modern business leader. I also oversee the production of the IT Revolution blog, combining the best of responsible, human-centered content with the assistance of AI tools.

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