IT has become an integral and inevitable part of business, yet most organizations do not consider IT teams as a value-adding entity. This psychology is doing nothing but increasing disconnect and reducing collaboration between business and software development teams.

A study commissioned by ThoughtWorks and conducted by Forrester Consulting reveals that disconnect between business expectations and software development results is continuously increasing .Besides, corporate culture and development process immaturity impede communication and slow service delivery. There is an expectation and perception gap between business and IT leaders, which further leads to communication gap.

“Software development teams and their providers can’t deliver new solutions at the rate business leaders want. This speed gap keeps businesses from using their software development capability to disrupt markets by introducing new products or features first. Instead, these businesses spend their time following industry trends–reacting to the market instead of shaping the playing field,” states the study titled Continuous Delivery: A Maturity Assessment Model.

Enterprises understand the growing importance of innovation, but most of them are not able to deliver custom software solutions as fast as business leaders need them. And this is mostly because they have a low level of maturity when it comes to continuous delivery. Only a small number of companies are executing mature continuous delivery practices like A/B testing, automated deployments, and test-driven development.

So, what we comprehend from this study? Is the lack of Continuous Delivery Model that is leading to this Business-IT disconnect? Is it the sole reason or we have a pile to solve?

One of the most important things that companies need to do is to have a strong fusion of Business-IT, collaborate to works as a single entity. What’s happening now is that IT is working as a supplier that supports Business, where IT fulfills this role without resistance. But when it comes to treating IT as an integral part of business, we see easily see the reluctance.

However, companies that practice Agile and DevOps are better than traditional companies as Business and development teams are better connected and collaborated in such companies. But yes, it’s difficult to adopt Agile in large companies and complex projects. It’s because when an organization implements agile teams that work in isolation, a disconnect results between the business and IT. Apparently, Derwyn Harris, Co-founder and Solutions Architect Manager at Jama Software suggests Sociocracy as possible solution to increase Business-IT collaboration.

“Organizations with larger, more complex projects struggle to adopt Agile. Some organizations won’t even try due to formal processes designed to ensure the projects meet regulations, follow contracts and avoid costly mistakes.

Sociocracy provides organizations the ability to streamline channels of communication by creating overlapping “circles” and “double-linking.” Circles are groups solely responsibility for a goal, such as a sprint. Double-linking ensures that representatives in each overlapping circle are present. This is not simply having a manager present in one circle to listen in. Double-linking ensures that communications and decisions are relayed quickly, without losing information or causing confusion.

A good exercise is to write down each perceived circle within your organization. Next, connect how they communicate and determine who represents the double-linking. Chances are you will find either a single person who is acting as a single-link in many circles, or no direct overlap at all. This is where the communication breakdown begins and is the primary reason why Agile fails.”

To summarize, Agile practices are a good start, but to really increase the rate of innovation, it’s important to also invest in improving downstream release management in order to increase overall delivery capability. Finally, companies must shift their models to view software development providers less as order takers and more as partners in delivering BT.