Some companies have made changes, such as giving product managers new fancy PO/PPO roles. But without sufficient training or changes to team dynamics, those shifts often remain superficial and don't improve team performance. Too many companies are still too quick to do fingerpointing at IT for every technical woe, from implementation and deployment delays to cost overruns.

That's not to say there isn't plenty of room for improvement on the IT side of the house. Efforts to modernize technology—from addressing tech debt to migrating to the cloud to building up tech talent—all require significant improvements in how IT works and where it sets its priorities. But in a time when technological capabilities are a direct source of competitive advantage, why doesn't that happen more often?

There are many reasons, but the solution comes down to something that's deceptively simple: if IT is to become a real driver of value, both business and IT must overcome old habits and make a real commitment to being partners. That implies adoption on both sides of processes, mindsets, and capabilities that reinforce the mechanisms that nurture habits that can improve technology performance.

Because technology can seem confusing, unknown, or intimidating, those on the business side prefer to leave it to the IT experts. To bridge the disconnect, companies have turned to dedicated "go-between" roles as part of a well-meaning effort to make IT more responsive and customer oriented. Individuals variously designated as "translators," "demand IT," "business requirement managers," or "IT process managers" take business requests and turn them into clear requirements with instructions for workers on the IT side, many of whom work offshore.

Unfortunately, this often leads to reduced accountability on both sides of the divide. On the business side, managers are content to define requirements without understanding how technology can best deliver on them and to, in effect, wash their hands of the whole IT development process. On the IT side, translators often simply accept requests from the business side without understanding the core issue, so they don't think through the whole range of possible technology solutions. Even when the go-betweens speak for business needs and even report to or sit on the business side of the organization, they are rarely evaluated in terms of their P&L results. Meanwhile, the addition of an intermediary layer between business and IT slows time to market, which impedes digital efforts to accelerate the pace of business practices.

The goal here is to connect the top-level business strategy defined at the board level to technical implementation in IT. That means negotiating four levels, and business needs to be knowledgeable about, and involved in, all of them:

• Top management/board level
• Business process implementation
• IT governance
• Technology platform/Enablers

Each of these four levels can accelerate or slow down the development of new internal or external functionalities for the customer. But for the entire model to work effectively, it is important that the levels are aligned in their degree of maturity; being strong in one area and weak in another doesn't work well.

Effectively bridging the gap between business and IT requires alignment across the four levels outlined above. This interdependency is why it's much more important that all the elements reach similar levels of maturity than to have a few that perform well and a few that perform poorly. This is the classic "weakest link" principle, where weakness in one area is sufficient to undo the whole thing and doom all your business growth plans. The next figure shows typical example that you can see here and there (probably at your organization as well)

We are at DGTL helping organizations to navigate and bridge the boundaries and gaps across business, product and technology areas to allow true business sustainability and growth.