Agree/Disagree? IT Departments Should be Evacuated

Ronald G.  Ross
Ronald G. Ross Co-Founder & Principal, Business Rule Solutions, LLC , Executive Editor, Business Rules Journal and Co-Chair, Building Business Capability (BBC) Read Author Bio       || Read All Articles by Ronald G. Ross

Let's put you on the hot spot.  You are forced to agree or disagree with the following statement and defend your answer.

Evacuating the IT department to weave IT into the business optimizes business capabilities.

What would you say?

Here's how I answer:  I agree.

My reasoning:  Almost 20 years ago, John Zachman made me read an article by Peter F. Drucker in Forbes Magazine called The Next Information Revolution.   It made such an impression on me I still have a yellowing copy of it pasted on a cabinet in my office.

To make a long story short, the article relates how in the 1400s and 1500s there was a period of time when printers of books dined with royalty and noblemen.   Printing was such a revolutionary and scarce skill they were the heroes of the day.

By the late 1500s, however, printing had become such a commodity that the occupation had completely lost its luster.   No more dining with kings and queens.

My point is this:   The days of traditional departmental IT staff having unfettered access to the financial assets of the corporate budget will end sooner than you might think.   The current way of building business systems is unsustainable.   If you think the cloud was something, just wait!

I look at agile software development as the death throes of traditional IT.   Beyond it there's nowhere left to go to accelerate except to elevate the level of human interfaces with machines.   Economics will demand it.

As traditional IT loses its grip, IT will of course become better woven into the fabric of the business.   And that's going to be a great thing for optimizing business capabilities.

Knowingly or not, business analysts are playing a founder's role in that shift of power back to the business side.   Yes, some days it feels like an impossible struggle, but time, economics, and technology are on your side.

For further information, please visit BRSolutions.com     

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Standard citation for this article:


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Ronald G. Ross, "Agree/Disagree? IT Departments Should be Evacuated" Business Rules Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, (Feb. 2018)
URL: http://www.brcommunity.com/a2018/b940.html

About our Contributor:


Ronald  G. Ross
Ronald G. Ross Co-Founder & Principal, Business Rule Solutions, LLC , Executive Editor, Business Rules Journal and Co-Chair, Building Business Capability (BBC)

Ronald G. Ross is Principal and Co-Founder of Business Rule Solutions, LLC, where he actively develops and applies the BRS Methodology including RuleSpeak®, DecisionSpeak and TableSpeak.

Ron is recognized internationally as the "father of business rules." He is the author of ten professional books including the groundbreaking first book on business rules The Business Rule Book in 1994. His newest are:


Ron serves as Executive Editor of BRCommunity.com and its flagship publication, Business Rules Journal. He is a sought-after speaker at conferences world-wide. More than 50,000 people have heard him speak; many more have attended his seminars and read his books.

Ron has served as Chair of the annual International Business Rules & Decisions Forum conference since 1997, now part of the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference where he serves as Co-Chair. He was a charter member of the Business Rules Group (BRG) in the 1980s, and an editor of its Business Motivation Model (BMM) standard and the Business Rules Manifesto. He is active in OMG standards development, with core involvement in SBVR.

Ron holds a BA from Rice University and an MS in information science from Illinois Institute of Technology. Find Ron's blog on http://www.brsolutions.com/category/blog/. For more information about Ron visit www.RonRoss.info. Tweets: @Ronald_G_Ross

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