Is that a bad thing?

Joe Trammell recently blogged an interesting anecdote that concludes with the following moral:

"The first step in trying to improve any process in IT is convincing the people with the power to make decisions that the current process is flawed."

I'd remove the words "in IT" from Joe's statement.  In any organization, unless "they" agree that "it" is broken, "it" is not going to get fixed. Joe goes on to say:

"enterprise computing isn't just technical knowledge, it's also social interaction"

Amen!

In my experience, most software development obstacles are cultural.  People are different. One person's crisis is another person's acceptable annoyance - I'm not going to help you fix something unless I agree with you that it's broken.

There's no quick fix for this problem, but I think that we're headed in the right direction - BPMN, Business  Rules, Business Natural Languages -all attempts to foster better communication between Programmers and Business.  All attempts to help each camp understand what the heck the other camp is talking about.  All attempts to help each other understand what the problems really are.

We're not there yet. Communication is still a bit awkward and stifled - but we're getting there.