Improving Business to IT Communication

A lot has been written about the disconnect between IT and the rest of the business. As an example of a common communication problem, here is an example of a conversation (a bit bland and contrived, I'll admit) which I have experienced all too often:

Business user: I have a customer with a problem with the application.
Programmer: What seems to be the problem?
Business user: When they push this button, I want them to see a message.  Except they're not seeing one.
Programmer: Let me take a look to see what's going on.
- Pause -
Programmer: Their account is missing some information, which is causing the message to stay hidden.
Business user: That's not good.
Programmer: You can fix this problem by entering information on the "My Information" page.
Business user: Thanks, I'll ask them to do that.

Is there anything wrong here?  Some people might argue that there is not, since the business user is able to do what he/she needs to, and this was just a training issue.  I would argue, though, that there are two problems here:

1. The application is not intuitive enough
2. The underlying business problem is not fixed

In this case, both programmer and business user are more interested in solving the situation at hand rather than making a long-term fix to the problem.  The user will likely continue to have problems with this message not showing up and the programmer will focus his or her efforts elsewhere.  Perhaps this might be a better approach:

…
Programmer: Their account is missing some information, which is causing the message to stay hidden.
Business user: That's not good.
Programmer: You can fix this problem by entering information on the "My Information" page, but I'd bet this will continue to be a problem with other users.
Business user: I agree.  I can see how that message would be dependent on the "My Information" settings.  Can we make filling out that information required?
Programmer: We could do that.  We could also add default responses and ask the users to change the information if necessary.
Business user: Let's do that.  I don't want to force them to fill out more information than is needed.

The difference here is that both the programmer and business user see that the underlying cause of the problem - missing information on the customer's account - should be fixed for more than just this one customer.  Doing so would cause fewer headaches for both business user and programmer.  They came to an understanding, and found a solution that worked for both.

While this situation was vague, the problem it illustrates is not.  Technology personnel need to be sensitive to the business drivers behind their requests in order to suggest more complete solutions.  Next week I will get into some more specific recommendations for business managers to get more out of their software development initiatives.