Since I wrote a post about why IT and users hate each other some time ago, I've become much more aware of the gulf between businesspeople and IT. I see it everywhere now--sort of the way you start looking at everyone else's shoes after you buy a new pair. I've been trying to find analogies that are completely removed from technology and business to get a better perspective on it.

I've found a powerful one in our closest relatives, the apes.

Years ago, primatologists began writing lovingly about mysteriously nice male chimps. Unlike most male chimps, who spend their lives jockeying to become the top honcho (and thereby gain mating rights with all the females), these chimps had little interest in the games of betrayal, manipulation and occasional murder, that go with being a male chimp. They tended not to rank too highly in the hierarchy but they weren't milquetoasts, either. Their defining characteristic was a kind of indefatigable nobility. They risked death to help comrades, were much less territorial, protected the weak from bullying and refused to kill their own kind. Eventually, they were discovered to be a separate species altogether, called bonobos.

Scientists immediately wondered, what makes these animals so nice? They decided that it had to be access to food. The bonobos live on the side of the Gombe River in Africa where dense rainforests provide practically limitless access to food. Reduced competition for food made Bonobos societies more egalitarian, more matriarchal and much more, uh, demonstrative (Bonobos use sex the way we use a handshake) than animals that evolved in places with scarce resources, like chimps--and humans.

One scientist in particular, Frans de Waal, is outspoken in asserting that we are closely related to both kinds of ape. So while we tend to blame our worst impulses on our ape relatives, we also need to give them more credit for our tendency to want to rescue complete strangers from burning buildings or forgive former enemies. Looking at the differences between these two types of apes helps us see our own conflicting tendencies in a clearer light--and de Waal has written a great book on the subject, called Our Inner Ape. In particular, I think it helps illustrate some of the conflicts between IT the business.

Businesses tend to be hierarchical, with occasional egalitarian outbursts. But businesses enforce our natural tendency to hierarchy because they center on a scare resource: information. Knowledge is power is the wrong way to think about it, however. Knowledge is much less powerful if there is lots of it to go around. It's only in the places where it is really scarce where the old adage truly applies.

Think of information as food and think of the business as starving and think of IT as controlling who gets the food. Now you can see why there's so much emotion in the relationship.

But there's more here than the issue of scarcity. Our impulse to be territorial plays a big role, too. Being social animals, we identify strongly with our group--whether it is our families, friends, colleagues or our ethnic or national group. These loyalties are strong and deeply embedded in our evolutionary background. Chimp groups, for example, will often attack or kill chimps from neighboring groups who stray into their territory and will often invade nearby territories to rough up neighbors.

Chillingly, the identification with group goes deeper than any other type of bond, even family. For example, chimp siblings who grow up together but split into other groups later in life will kill each other as readily in territorial conflict as if they were perfect strangers. The reasoning is simple: left alone in the jungle, chimps will die. The group bond is more important to their survival than the individual bond. This has been verified in scientific research on humans. In one study, people were randomly assigned to the "red" team and "green" team. When members of the two teams gave presentations, people invariably rated presentations by members of their team higher than the other. This kind of group identification is hard wired in us.

IT and businesspeople also have group identifications, though in differing amounts, in my experience. IT has two groups that it identifies with strongly--one is the worldwide community of practice that cuts across business boundaries and the other is the core group of IT colleagues inside the company. Businesspeople have no real community of practice and identify more as a group within individual companies. Even this group identification isn't as strong as IT's, I find. Businesspeople unite less out of a sense of shared purpose than in the knowledge that the business group is the most powerful group in the company and therefore is the best group to be in.

Indeed, businesspeople have a much stronger sense of hierarchy, I think, because it is more important to their survival. They succeed according to how well they can rise within the company--relationship building, an ape specialty--rather than by perfecting a set of broadly applicable skills, as an IT person does.

I think the emphasis on skill building distracts IT people from an emphasis on hierarchy and power. I'd rather chalk it up to distraction than any innate tendency to egalitarianism because if you believe in the social animal analogy, we all have a deep, innate yearning for status in hierarchical settings. An interesting comment to my original "hate" blog came from Brian K. Seitz, who says that in the 80s, he taught classes at the IBM Executive Institute, where he used to put IT and business people through an exercise in which they switched roles. "What I found interesting," he says, "was that it didn't matter who was in the [IT or business] position. Eventually, they all took on the same behaviors of the roles." In other words, IT people turned into impetuous, demanding users and business people became defensive and demoralized.

Inside companies, it's important to remember that there is an individual hierarchy and a group hierarchy. In terms of group hierarchy, IT is always at a disadvantage. Business groups are institutionally defined as the top group because they control the relationship with the customer and that's where the money is. IT, along with other administrative functions like HR, is secondary. The CEO can talk about partnering with IT all he or she wants, but humans need hierarchy to make sense of the world and I have never been inside a company where IT has not played second fiddle. It is a source of deep resentment among IT people because it gets to our sense of fairness.

Next time, I'll talk about how deeply embedded our sense of fairness is, and why it is critical to figuring out how to improve relations between IT and the business.

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