Opinion | Greasing 'it' - Divide between Business and IT

I was having coffee with a friend of mine who is a commercial pilot. With as much flying as I do it’s hard not to ask him a ton of stupid flying questions. We got onto the subject of landing. His point was, “Too many pilots try and grease the landing.” A lot of us cattle customers judge a pilot’s ability by how smoothly he or she is able to put the plane on the ground. We just don’t have anything else to go on. But the reality is that in order to “grease” the landing you’ve got to give up precious runway. “The landing zone is there for a reason…so you have lots of runway left in case something goes bad.”

This got me thinking about where and how we, in the IT business, get caught in trying to grease it.

Sometimes when we go to clients there is a big divide between the business and IT. The preverbal locked cockpit door behind which all the IT magic happens. The business is kept in the dark about exactly what it takes to get projects done the right way. This facilitates an attitude of just getting things done quickly and quietly for the business. But it is also really fertile ground for taking short cuts that have a longer term impact on the business.

There is a reason 92% of integration is custom code. Those messy point to point integrations that are a pain in the neck to manage. The IT managers greased it.