Get your business and technical people working together

I was fortunate early in my career to have worked for a manager that understood the importance for "technologists" to focus on the business. He encouraged us to spend time with business people and end users so that we would have a better understanding of the business processes and the responsibilities of the end users of the applications we were working on.

He would say; "It doesn't matter if you are the greatest programmer in the world, you can't write great business applications if you don't understand the business."

Common sense, perhaps, but this is a lesson that has served me well and one that I have never forgotten.

Recently, I read a story that helps illustrate this point: An architect once designed a cluster of buildings. When asked by the landscape crew where to pave the sidewalks, he told them to plant grass between all the buildings, wait a year, then, after the occupants had worn the most useful paths, the architect told the landscape crew to pave the pathways that the occupants have created.

The point of the story is simple: Find out what people need or how they really work and then provide the solution. It is easy for people to imagine what people may want or need or how someone works, but it is much better to learn from people how they really work and what they really need.

A real-world example of this is the software maker Intuit (QuickBooks, TurboTax).

Intuit has a program in place named "Follow Me Home." The program, in a nutshell, sends Inuit software developers to the businesses and homes of real customers to watch them using the software - this helps the developers understand the real-world needs of the end users and teaches the developers how people use the software.

Another real-world example is from a local company that has reorganized its IT department along business units. It has a group of people dedicated to manufacturing and another group dedicated to sales and logistics. This enables the developers to focus on specific business processes and foster relationships with a consistent group of end users.

If I were running an IT shop today, I would institute some type of program to get these constituents together:

<"Business/Technology Partner Program" - Match a business and technical person and allow them to spend time mentoring each other on their areas of knowledge and expertise.

<"A day in the life" - Send all of your technical folks out into the business to spend a day alongside the business people who use the technology that they produce.

There are benefits for both parties to participate, not the least of which is the education that they will receive. For the business folks, one benefit is solutions that better match their needs. For the technical folks, one of the benefits they get will be a reduction in the number of changes that are typically made to applications though an increased understanding of the business.

This fostered collaboration will lead to solutions that better match business needs.



Jon Strande is a business technologist at Mechanicsburg-based Technical Services Associates. He can be reached at jstrande@tsagate.com.