2026-03-09
Merijn Boom
It is a familiar frustration on both sides of the organisation. IT presents a solution that is robust, secure and scalable. The business responds that it is too complex, too slow or simply not what was asked for.
From the business perspective, IT is overregulating. From the IT perspective, the business is choosing a shortcut that will cause problems later. Both are usually right. And that is precisely why the same pattern keeps repeating itself.
IT and business optimise for different things. IT focuses on stability, risk, dependencies and long-term maintainability. Decisions are evaluated by what could go wrong, not only by what works today.
The business operates in a different reality. Speed matters. Simplicity matters. What matters most is whether work can continue and results can be delivered now.
Neither perspective is unreasonable. The problem is not the difference itself, but when decisions are made. Choices are often locked in before these perspectives are properly connected.
What looks like disagreement later is often something else: people are answering different questions, after the decision has already been shaped.
This becomes visible when solutions technically make sense, but operationally don’t land. Take security measures like two-factor authentication.
From an IT perspective, the reasoning is clear: risk reduction and protection. From a user’s perspective, it is friction. Another step. Another interruption. Another thing that fails when you are in a hurry.
When it goes wrong, IT is blamed. When it works, it is barely noticed. The issue is not the solution itself. It is that the context behind the solution never shaped the decision in the first place.
Business decisions often appear logical within the business context. A simpler solution feels faster and easier to adopt. What is usually invisible at that moment are the technical consequences: dependencies, maintenance burden and architectural impact.
Those considerations surface later, when change becomes expensive. At the same time, IT decisions can feel abstract to the work floor. Risks are discussed conceptually, while operational pain is not fully experienced.
Both sides act on incomplete information. And both assume their perspective is sufficient to decide. It usually isn’t.
The gap becomes visible again when solutions are considered “finished”. The business evaluates success by usability and flow: can people work without friction? IT evaluates success by delivery and stability: does the solution meet the agreed requirements?
When these definitions were never aligned before decisions were made, disappointment is inevitable. Not because someone failed, but because “done” was never the same thing to begin with.
Only afterwards does it become clear that the conversation never covered the same ground.
What makes this pattern persistent is that it rarely feels like failure while decisions are being taken. A direction is chosen. A budget is approved. A timeline is communicated.
Nothing feels final yet. Everything still feels adjustable. In reality, the decision has already hardened. Once expectations are set and commitments are made, alignment becomes corrective instead of exploratory.
Conversations shift from “what should we choose” to “how do we make this work”. By the time misalignment becomes visible, changing course feels too costly.
Most organisations already work together. Meetings happen. Proposals are reviewed. Tickets are processed. But thinking together has to happen earlier.
It means understanding what the other side is optimising for before a decision is framed. It means surfacing assumptions, risks and trade-offs while there is still room to choose.
This is not about better communication skills. It is about better decision design.
IT problems persist not because solutions are wrong, but because decisions are taken without shared context at the moment it mattered most.
When IT and business choose different solutions, it is rarely stubbornness or incompetence. It is the predictable outcome of rational perspectives meeting too late in the process.
As long as alignment starts after commitment, outcomes will remain familiar. The real challenge isn’t choosing better solutions. It’s recognising which conversations must happen before decisions become irreversible.
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