Tod means Fox

So today I am wearing jeans and a faded (but once pleasant) button-down shirt. No tie, although my shoes are nice and I am wearing dark socks. A few others around me are similarly dressed, which is typical for summer Fridays. Then there are those who are in full suits, as if preparing for a job interview or some important sales meeting. Others are in suits but without tie which is in-and-of-itself a very strange practice; I call these “half-suits”.

You can draw two lines in the sand separating all three groups of Friday dressers. You have the “workers” – those actively engaged in business operations like myself; the middle management-type who are no longer “workers” and who aspire to delegate more and more activities, you know the type – it’s just like them not to wear ties with their suits; lastly, there are those who on the one end of the spectrum make only infrequent strategic decisions of the C-level type and on the other end those who work for mostly commission and must rely on their superior charisma (and sharp suits) to get ahead.

My colleague and I are working feverishly at the moment to improve the performance of one of our BI applications: A process we hope to improve from roughly 15 minutes to about 7 minutes (so half-suit and full-suit can have more time at the cooler). In addition, I am troubleshooting a foreign key violation in one of our ETL loads, and my partner-in-crime is hunting down the results of some replication testing in our production environment. Meanwhile, a full suit is currently browsing an online golf store; the half-suits are centered around the water cooler.

This, symbolically, highlights the problems with business and IT alignment in general — especially in large organizations. I find that IT is normally of the first variety – willing to dress down whenever possible to add a little comfort to an otherwise fast-paced existence full of responsibility and accountability. Dressing down in no-way implies a dress down of activities or a dumbing down of skills.

As you can tell, this is a bit of a rant and a fallacious attempt at tossing my colleagues into generalized buckets. But one thing is very true: business and IT need to get in sync. I would like to think that my team is above average in this regard. The immediate team consists of business and IT personnel - all of which are fighting for a successful project.

‘d like to hear your thoughts on this matter….