LLMs and Generative AI in the enterprise.
Inspire, develop, and guide a winning organization.
Understand the unique values and behaviors of a successful organization.
Create visible workflows to achieve well-architected software.
Understand and use meaningful data to measure success.
Integrate and automate quality, security, and compliance into daily work.
An on-demand learning experience from the people who brought you The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, Accelerate, and more.
Learn how to enhance collaboration and performance in large-scale organizations through Flow Engineering
Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
Clarify team interactions for fast flow using simple sense-making approaches and tools.
Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders.
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years.
Exploring the impact of GenAI in our organizations & creating business impact through technology leadership.
DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
The debate over in-office versus remote work misses a fundamental truth: high-performing teams succeed based on how they’re organized, not where they sit.
Leaders can help their organizations move from the danger zone to the winning zone by changing how they wire their organization’s social circuitry.
The values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.
This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance.
May 5, 2025
The divide between business and IT has been a persistent challenge in organizations for decades. Despite widespread recognition that technology is crucial for competitive advantage, many organizations still struggle to create true partnership between their business and technology groups.
As the research team behind the guidance paper “Winning Together” notes,
“Both sides express frustration. Business leaders report feeling stymied by what they perceive as the high costs and rigidity of their technology groups, and thus seek to work around those groups with so-called ‘Shadow IT.’ On the flip side, technology leaders express frustration with business leaders who view Technology as a cost center, seem to expect a purely transactional funding-based relationship, and who push back on any investment that does not yield immediate and tangible benefits.”
The cost of this misalignment is significant. Dr. Nicole Forsgren and colleagues found in their research that organizations with strong business-IT alignment significantly outperform their peers. As detailed in Accelerate, high-performing organizations deliver software changes 208 times more frequently and recover from incidents 2,604 times faster than their low-performing counterparts.
To begin addressing this divide, we must first understand its causes:
Business and IT typically operate with fundamentally different decision-making frameworks. According to Flow Engineering, the business thinks primarily in terms of competitors, customers, product portfolios, and financials, while IT focuses on technical architecture, system reliability, and engineering practices.
This difference manifests in language as well. When business leaders talk about “going faster,” they often mean faster time-to-market for new features. Meanwhile, IT might interpret that as needing to accelerate deployment frequency. Both are talking about speed, but in completely different contexts.
Traditional organizational hierarchies physically separate business and IT functions. Sooner Safer Happier points out that these siloed structures create a situation where teams optimize for their local goals rather than overall business outcomes.
Additionally, project-based funding models reinforce transactional relationships. As “Winning Together” explains, funding technology project-by-project creates artificial short-term thinking and makes it difficult to invest in long-term capabilities.
The research presented in “Measuring Leadership” highlights how business and technology teams often have different cultural norms. Business culture tends to value bold action and risk-taking, while technology culture often emphasizes precision and risk mitigation.
Dr. Ron Westrum’s research on organizational cultures, referenced in the paper “How to Thrive in Building a Learning Culture,” demonstrates how these cultural differences affect information flow. In bureaucratic or pathological organizations, information gets stuck in silos, while generative organizations share information freely across boundaries.
While fully bridging the business-IT gap takes time, there are concrete steps you can begin taking immediately:
Technology leaders should invest time in understanding the broader business context in which they operate. The authors of “Winning Together” suggest asking questions like:
“Who are your company’s key competitors and how rapidly is the competitive landscape changing? Who are your target customers and what factors drive their buying decisions? What makes your organization’s products or services special—what’s the ‘secret sauce’?”
This knowledge helps technology leaders frame technology decisions in business terms and demonstrates a commitment to business outcomes.
Value Stream Mapping is a powerful technique for creating shared understanding. According to Flow Engineering, mapping your end-to-end value streams reveals:
This exercise brings business and IT stakeholders together around a common visual representation of how value is delivered to customers.
“Winning Together” emphasizes the importance of shared metrics that connect technology activities to business outcomes. Dominica DeGrandis and colleagues suggest five key flow metrics:
When the business and IT track these metrics together, they create a shared language for discussing improvements.
Establish a dedicated time for business and IT leaders to discuss mutual concerns, opportunities, and challenges. “How to Thrive in Building a Learning Culture” emphasizes that these shouldn’t be status updates, but genuine dialogue about shared outcomes.
Effective forums include:
Begin exploring alternatives to traditional project-based funding. You might start with a single product or value stream where you can experiment with:
This creates room for more strategic technology investment while still maintaining accountability for business results.
These initial steps won’t instantly transform your organization, but they begin creating the foundation for a deeper partnership. In the upcoming parts of this series, we’ll explore:
By starting with these practical actions today, you’ll be well-positioned to deepen the business-IT partnership in ways that create lasting value for your organization.
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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