The way CIOs think and communicate reinforces alignment, either for the better or the worse. IT Professionals who are really serious about alignment need to ban the phrase “the business side” from their vocabulary. Quite simply, if you are still using this phrase, you are not currently aligned and are undermining your own efforts to become aligned.

The big problem is that when people refer to “the business side,” they are implying that IT is somehow not part of the business. They imply that IT has a different agenda, is working towards different goals, or is somehow incapable of understanding business needs. The term perpetuates and widens a divide between IT and the rest of the business, and fosters an "us vs. them" attitude. For as long as you and others see “the business side” as a separate entity, it most certainly will be treated as a separate entity, and true alignment will elude your most vigorous efforts.

The problem doesn’t end there. Some people use the term “business needs” as a panacea to justify tasks and projects, or to impose various constraints on them. You can often directly interpret “to meet the needs of the business” as either “I don’t want to explain it,” or “I can’t explain it.” This is suspiciously like a logical fallacy called “appeal to authority.” When there is no known reason, authority and justification can quickly be diverted to an irreproachable entity called “the business side.”

Now for the hard part - you need to banish “the business side” from your own life. Never use the phrase yourself, and don’t accept it from anyone else. When you catch yourself wanting to say “the business side” or to justify projects with “to meet the needs of the business,” you need to think more specifically about who you are really talking about. Your reference should be narrow enough to identify a specific person or a specific group of actual living, breathing, people. If you aren’t sure, you have some research to do. If you are serious about alignment, you will not shirk this duty.

In the event you are speaking with someone who mentions “the business side,” you should seek clarification. If the answer is still too general, keep digging until you are satisfied that you can identify at least one specific person on “the business side” related to this subject.

At this point you may begin to see how banishing “the business side” will help with alignment. It starts by giving names and faces to internal customers, which makes them feel like real people. It’s a lot easier to care about providing superior products and services to real people than it is to the self-serving “business side” of an unseeing, uncaring, monolithic entity. When the IT staff can identify actual people, they will begin to understand that other humans in the organization are working hard to overcome their own obstacles and meet their own goals, and depend upon the good work of IT to help make that happen. This is very different from catering to the endless requests, and at times seemingly mindless whims, of a large corporate entity. Once the IT staff begins to understand the impact of their work and care about the results, they are more likely to start a dialog to discover what is really needed and how their work will impact the lives of others. As a consequence of this communication, others in the company will see that IT is also composed of real

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