I love the photo!
I wish it were that simple. Often, the IT silo is shorter, and is connected to the upper middle of the business silo. And there are multiple business silos. The value stream is a garden hose running from one silo to the next.
Words shape our thinking.
One of the fundamental problems IMO is the use of the single acronym "IT" to encompass things as diverse as:
1. Infrastructure (servers and routers and switches and desktops/laptops/smartphones), to
2. Purchased/licensed general-utility applications used inside the walls to do the usual stuff, to
3. Transactional systems that cross business boundaries up- and down-stream, to
4. Consumer-facing websites and business-intelligence systems
This isn't my idea--I first read about it 10 years ago in "Leveraging the New Infrastructure." The dimensions of IT have different cost structures and yield value in different ways. They range from totally indifferent to the nature of the business they serve to joined at the brain and heart. Projects to implement them require completely different teams and have completely different risk profiles and predictability. The same can be said for "maintaining" them.
IT leadership may not even recognize and account for the diversity in how they need to "do IT." What chance do people outside have?.
I've written about this at http://wistechnology.com/articles/5105/ and on my website http://www.ufunctional.com.
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