Connecting Business and IT

Note: This article is updated at Connecting Business and IT.

This is a mental model we often use when connecting business and IT.

The big idea is that IT exposes it’s functionality as “services” to the business.   When speaking to the business, we can talk about business capabilities.  When talking to IT, we can talk to the IT capabilities.

In this model, you can see where workloads sit in relation to business and IT capabilities. Business capabilities (i.e. “what” an individual business function does) rely on IT capabilities. The IT capabilities, together with people and processes, determine “how” the business capability is executed.

The beauty of the model is how quickly and easily we can “up-level” the conversation, or drill-down … or map from the business to the IT side or from IT to the business.