The Perpetual IT Vs Business Hate Equation

While I covered in an earlier post on the issue of difficulties in IT Management, CIO.com's Christopher Koch sees little hope that IT will ever truly be aligned with the business. Pointing to what he calls, sometimes hilarious, sometimes maddening conversation thread on Slashdot that appeared recently. A cursory study of the thread confirms his view that it displays all the worst behaviors of business and IT people and by accident reveals some good lessons. To my mind root one of the key rootcause is - Companies like Microsoft throwing to the market inferior products puts pressure on people using them. I keep getting same error message for two plus years from the so called online auto error reporting and diagnostic mechanism from Microsoft. Yesterday while onboard the transcontinetal flight, my laptop repeatedly warned that profile is corrupted and so I could not log in and I lost almost 24 hours of doing anything with my laptop. I come home start the laptop - hey presto everything is working( atleast for the past two hours) - no trace of any corruption at all. Only companies like Microsoft can pull off such acheievements!!. It is slowly becoming a case that IT infrastructure is certainly needed, but it may not be the core business for most user industries. So treat it the way it ought to be. For those managing infrastructure internally, the advise is provide in the budget, a lion's share of IT salary to network engineers and get in some very talented and motivated people- a smooth balancing is possible. But the larger issue of IT needing to focus on increasing business benefit can not be underplayed. As a variation of this user dissatification is similarly experienced in the rollout of business applications as well.