Business vs IT

photo by Maria Kostyleva (IG:masha_and_film)

“… I mean not Data Scientists, but people who really create value — business people.”

This is a quote from a keynote at an event hosted by a software vendor I attended recently. Today, I want to talk about “Business vs IT”, a topic as old as the first computer ever purchased for commercial purposes.

While listening to this vendor presentation, clearly crafted for the main decision-makers (business people), I recalled that when I was working for another software vendor myself, we often sold a very similar vision: a tool for business users to automate decision-making with minimal involvement from Data/IT teams on the client side.

It was a SaaS offering, and indeed a large portion of the support was covered by the provider. However, even in this case, some data experts from the client side had to be involved: for example, to integrate and support data pipelines and to embed the solution into the existing IT landscape. I saw many SaaS onboardings being significantly postponed (causing a lot of missed value) because IT experts on the client side were involved much later than needed or with far less capacity than required.

With AI, we are entering “self-service” era 2.0. There are plenty of tools on the market where you can do many things via natural-language interfaces, and you can even vibe-code tools yourself. Business departments, which started building shadow data teams a few years ago, are very excited: with the 2.5 people they have, they can cover so much, without that slow and bureaucratic IT department!

Well, so far I haven’t seen any team consisting purely of data people sitting in a business department and successfully deploying ML/AI products or services one after another. Ironically, as a mentor, I’ve talked to many people from such teams who are now looking for a new place to work, one where they can actually create real value.

So, what is missing?

Culture.

IT teams, due to the size and complexity of the problems they work on, are forced to organize themselves, promote knowledge sharing, and maintain a wide range of expertise within the department. It is also a well-known fact that AI coding assistants are a significant productivity multiplier for experienced developers — and much less so for citizen developers.

Does this mean that business should forget about being hands-on in building products and services themselves? Not at all.

The most successful enterprise development teams are actually a mix of business and IT people. This leads to products that are truly needed and that meet the quality, security, and robustness requirements of enterprise applications.

So, if you manage to turn “Business vs IT” into “Business + IT”, where both sides of the equation are equally important, success becomes unavoidable.