IT and the Building of Intellectual Capital–Are You Ready?

I was inspired by a great post here from IT Business Alignment blog that talked about the need for IT to focus on business, not technology.

In drafting my comment, I came upon  an analogy between building intellectual capital and building a house. IT often is treated (and acts) as a specialty contractor–creating the plumbing, the wiring and the foundation. I started thinking. What is really needed is a general contractor (GC), someone that coordinates all the pieces to make sure it is an integrated whole. Is that the role of IT? I think so. They have to make the pieces fit together, to coordinate it all.

But I realized that there is more to the analogy. Because a GC needs an architect’s drawings. The architect designs it all, not just the subsystems, but the finished product. The architect ensures that the project fits into its environment, meets the client’s needs and works as a whole.

The architect would be the person that would need to meld IT and IC, information technology and intellectual capital.  On individual projects, there is always a business sponsor. But most businesspeople lack the experience needed to serve as an overseer of a design. Note that this role is different from the role of a systems architect who really is one of the “specialty contractors” on the team.

Who has the responsibility for this kind of design approach to IT in the average corporation? The VP Operations? The CEO? A lot of the problems with IT implementations indeed result from the lack of an answer to that question. Most of the time, IT gets this role by default.

I have worked on the business side of enough IT projects to know how hard it is to successfully automate business processes. In retrospect, I think sometimes I have been able to play the role of the architect, ensuring that business needs were met by the technology “GC’s.”  But I would be interested in feedback–can IT play the role of solution architect, GC and specialty contractor–or is there a better way?