Dear IT: The Business Called. It Has Some Notes.
There is a feedback loop that exists in most organizations between IT and the business that is, by any reasonable engineering standard, poorly designed. Business stakeholders experience problems with technology and communicate them through a combination of tickets, escalations, complaints to leadership, and the quiet workarounds they implement when they have concluded that the formal channel is not going to produce a timely result. IT receives this feedback unevenly, filtered through whatever made it to the ticketing system and whatever escalated loudly enough to get attention, and responds to what it received rather than what was actually experienced. The gap between what the business is experiencing and what IT knows the business is experiencing is often significant, usually uncomfortable, and almost never measured.
The organizations that close this gap do it through deliberate, structured business relationship management rather than through the occasional satisfaction survey or the once-a-year IT all-hands where business stakeholders are invited to share feedback and mostly say polite things because the honest things would create awkwardness. Business relationship management, done properly, means someone in IT has regular, scheduled, bilateral conversations with business unit leaders, not to present IT's roadmap but to understand what those leaders are trying to accomplish, where technology is enabling their work, and where it is creating friction they have stopped mentioning because they have given up expecting it to change. That last category is the most important and the most invisible, and it requires a relationship deep enough that people will say the honest thing rather than the polite one.
The feedback IT most needs to hear is almost never the feedback it is easiest to receive. The escalated ticket is loud and requires a response, but it represents a single event rather than a pattern. The survey that asks "how satisfied are you with IT support" on a scale of one to five generates a number that tells you very little about what is generating it. The genuine intelligence lives in the specific, contextual, experience-based feedback that comes from a business leader who trusts the IT relationship enough to say "your patch cycle is disrupting our Monday morning reporting window every month and we've just started working around it rather than telling you" or "the new security tool you deployed added four steps to our most common workflow and we've had three people quit the company in the last quarter citing that among their frustrations." Both of those sentences are about IT. Neither of them would appear in a satisfaction survey or a ticket queue.
The uncomfortable truth about IT-business alignment is that IT tends to measure its own performance on metrics that are internally coherent but externally invisible. Uptime, ticket resolution time, patch compliance percentage: these are legitimate operational measures, and improving them is real work. But a business unit whose systems are up 99.9% of the time and whose tickets are closed in four hours but whose employees spend thirty minutes every morning navigating a login workflow that was designed for a security requirement rather than a human being is not experiencing good IT. They are experiencing operationally measured IT, which is a different thing. The business has notes. The question is whether IT has built the relationship to receive them.
Closing the gap requires something that does not come naturally to technically oriented professionals: sitting in meetings where the point is not to solve a problem but to understand one. Listening to a business leader describe their quarterly objectives and asking what technology constraints are making those objectives harder to achieve is not efficient in the sense that a helpdesk resolution is efficient. It is strategic in the sense that every conversation like that produces intelligence that makes the next six months of IT investment more accurate and more valuable. The business called. Pick up.
