Living in the World Between Technology and Business

When Graham and I started Project X, one if the names for the company that we were going to go with was "Bridging the Gap".  We chose this as one of the front runners as it spoke to one of the issues that we are often trying to deal with bridging the gap between technology and the business.

I was catching up on some reading yesterday and was reminded by how difficult it is to play to the various audiences we talk with on a regular basis.  Jim often reminds Graham and I about how we get to technical with acronyms and the like, but I have also gotten feedback in the past where we need to go into more detail.

This all came to a the forefront in a meeting yesterday where an end user in marketing wanted to see how our new ETL solution worked.

I found this an interesting opportunity to look into the whys and details of the situation and found that this business user was more unsure of what they did need to know and so felt the need to dive deep into an area where there was really no pool.  This is contrasted by someone on the project within IT who should be diving deep to understand the intracacies of the situation who isn’t.

On reflection I realized that this was mostly a personality and historic experience situation.  But having worked harder to probe into the underlying motivators I feel better that we will be better addressing both sides of the balance.

It is a real challenge for us to respect the other side of the balance in both the over use of our personal terminology as well as not explaining enough detail about our world to make people understand and be comfortable.

  1. Jim Reply

    I wonder if you should use a tag line for Project X of “Bridging the Gap” like we did at Gellman Hayward with “Linking Management and Technology.”
    We had it underneath the the name.

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