Far from reaching its peak, digital transformation continues to profoundly redefine the role of the IT department. Long recognized as the technical backbone of the company, it must now meet growing demands. Business units, in search of increasingly specific digital solutions, expect it to become a true strategic partner.
However, tensions remain in many organizations. Business teams often perceive the IT department as rigid or disconnected from their needs, hindering overall agility and limiting the impact of innovations.
In this article, discover how Martec’s Law, which illustrates the gap between rapid technological change and slower organizational adaptation, is reflected in the relationship between IT departments and business units. You will learn how to turn this collaboration into a driver of performance, enabling companies to take full advantage of opportunities and remain competitive in an ever-changing world.
Martec’s Law: a reflection of the challenges between IT departments and business units
Martec’s Law was formulated by Scott Brinker, an expert in marketing technologies. It highlights a fundamental gap between technologies, which are advancing at an exponential rate, and organizations, which are adapting much more slowly, following a logarithmic curve.
This law illustrates a universal truth: the difficulty organizations have in keeping pace with the rapid pace of technological innovation, which is essential to remaining competitive. Often hampered by rigid structures and outdated processes, organizations struggle to keep up. But to avoid falling behind, they must adopt more agile models and radically rethink their practices.
This inertia, well illustrated by Martec’s Law, is reflected in companies’ internal processes. It particularly affects interactions between IT departments and business teams, creating disconnects that weaken many organizations.
The IT department, whose mission is to ensure the stability, security, and consistency of information systems, plays an essential role in the sustainability of the organization. However, its approach is often perceived as too rigid or standardized by business units, whose immediate and specific needs require more tailored and agile responses. This divergence in priorities and perceptions fuels frustration and tension, slowing down the overall agility of the organization.
Companies that aspire to bridge the gap between technological advances and their ability to adapt must first and foremost strengthen collaboration between IT and business teams. Smooth, aligned collaboration does more than just reduce tensions: it is an essential lever for improving the organization’s overall performance and maximizing the impact of technological innovations. Those that rise to this challenge will be better equipped to take advantage of the opportunities offered by digital transformation and maintain their competitive edge.
Identify barriers to flexibility and innovation
To understand how a company’s IT department can fully support its business lines, it is essential to identify the obstacles that currently limit its flexibility.
The IT department: a key role but limitations to overcome
With the explosion of intuitive and accessible digital applications, business units are expressing increasingly specific needs. They are looking for solutions that can quickly respond to their operational challenges and expect the IT department to support them in this dynamic. However, certain practices within IT departments, still influenced by habits inherited from the past, no longer fully meet today’s requirements for flexibility and evolution. They thus limit flexibility and hinder the ability to innovate.
One of the IT department’s main missions is standardization. By relying on publishers such as Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle, it aims to simplify system management, reduce costs, and guarantee security and interoperability. This strategy makes sense on paper. In reality, it limits the agility required to meet the specific expectations of business units. These units sometimes find themselves stuck with overly generic choices that are ill-suited to their actual needs.
The result? They are forced to adopt standardized tools that do not meet the requirements of their projects, hampering their efficiency and ability to innovate. This is precisely the challenge faced by the French Cher Department, which was previously confronted with the complexity of Microsoft Project, which was unsuited to the needs of its teams.
In addition, IT departments often take a top-down approach to their technological choices. Decisions are centralized, and business units are rarely consulted. This leads to solutions that are unsuitable or underused. To compensate, employees cobble together tools that are ill-suited to their challenges and find themselves juggling layers upon layers of Excel files. The solutions provided do not meet real needs, and the gap only widens.
Finally, and understandably so, the IT department is characterized by a strong aversion to risk. It focuses its efforts on its core mission: ensuring cybersecurity, compliance, and service continuity. While this caution is essential, it can lead to the rejection of innovative or specialized solutions that could effectively meet business needs.
Application rationalization: a double-edged sword
Streamlining information systems offers undeniable advantages: simplifying infrastructure and application management, reducing operating costs, improving compliance, and ensuring interoperability. By reducing the number of platforms and tools, it enables smoother management and optimizes resources, while promoting greater system consistency.
But behind these benefits lie disadvantages that cannot be ignored. The standardization of tools, often at the expense of specific business needs, limits their ability to respond to operational challenges. Generalist solutions, although economical and suitable for a wide range of uses, lack the depth to address the specific needs of teams. Added to this is the structural rigidity that excessive rationalization can lead to. Business lines then struggle to quickly access the right tools, slowing down the progress of their projects and generating frustration and loss of efficiency.
In a world where agility has become essential to remain competitive, these limitations can seriously affect the organization’s performance. Finding a balance between streamlining and integrating specialized platforms is essential. This requires close partnership between the IT department and business teams, so that each need is addressed appropriately and innovation is not sacrificed on the altar of standardization.
Making IT-business collaboration a driver of performance
The IT department has the potential to be a real driver of performance and innovation. Here are some approaches and objectives to consider in order to overcome the obstacles it may present for business lines.
Adopting a facilitator role
The IT department must resolutely adopt a collaborative and flexible approach. This means shifting from the role of “controller” to that of “strategic partner,” supporting business units in their initiatives. By offering flexible and secure environments, it enables teams to test and integrate specialized tools, while ensuring the stability and security of information systems.
Promoting innovation through hybrid approaches
The IT department can integrate specialized solutions that meet the specific needs of business units while maintaining a stable and streamlined core IT system. In addition, tools such as low-code or no-code enable business units to develop their own tools in a secure environment, without being entirely dependent on the IT department. This approach gives them the freedom to respond quickly to their operational challenges, while ensuring the consistency and stability of information systems.
Establish communication and a dynamic of co-construction with the business lines
Collaboration and communication are central to this transformation. By establishing constant dialogue between the IT department and business units, it becomes possible to ensure that technological choices truly meet the needs on the ground. This also involves creating multidisciplinary teams, bringing together IT and business teams to jointly develop tailored, practical solutions. This collective effort enables technology to become a real strategic lever for the organization.
Set up sandbox environments
To achieve this, it is essential to set up sandbox environments. These spaces enable business units to quickly test solutions without affecting the central infrastructure, while reducing the time needed to experiment with and adopt new technologies, all while maintaining the stability of existing systems.
With these approaches, IT teams can become a driving force for transformation within the company. By striking a balance between stability and adaptation, they effectively support business units in meeting their challenges, while helping to strengthen the organization’s overall competitiveness in the face of the demands of a constantly changing world.
By promoting constructive dialogue and genuine collaboration, what was once a source of friction can become a strategic asset. This cooperation represents a major challenge in the 21st century, but also a tremendous opportunity for all organizations seeking to thrive in an ever-changing environment.
