Is your organization staffed with people who are experts at eliminating the ‘us and them' relationship between IT and the business?

In the past four and half years I have visited well over 100 companies and spoken to thousands of people at well over 100 events. Time and time and time again I have witnessed a divisive and sometimes adversarial ‘us and them' relationship between IT organizations and the businesses that contain them. In my new book, "Eliminating ‘Us and Them' - Making IT and the Business One" http://bit.ly/ifc9Tu, I describe how IT governance, process and process management, and behavioral management remove the gulf between IT and the business.

Save for some challenges of traditional views of IT governance (if you can call them that), none of the main topics of the book are new. What is new is the discussion of IT governance, process, and organizational behavior as three interdependent and essential elements to making IT organizations an integrated and inseparable part of the business. There are many books about these subjects but none of them present all three as the foundation, bricks, and mortar of a single overarching construct for IT to be one with the business.

There are numerous barriers to overcoming the challenge of viewing and simultaneously managing IT governance, process, and organizational behavior. But the one I fear the most is the lack of enterprise expertise in each of these areas. I have found very few organizations staffed with IT governance experts or process and process management experts. Though almost every HR department has knowledge in organizational behavior, I have yet to see one that directly connects the discipline to ensure personnel can thrive in a governance and process construct.

Almost every enterprise is addressing IT governance, process and process management, and organizational behavior to one degree or another. But I have encountered only a few that consider these disciplines to be so essential to their success that they view them as critical core competencies.

What is the situation in your company? Has your organization invested in and established IT governance, process, and organizational behavior proficiency? Do you have IT governance, process, and organizational behavior experts? I'd love to hear your stories.

Steve Romero, IT Governance Evangelist