Division between Business and Technology - Is It Still Relevant?

After working in financial industry in different companies, I started to doubt the distinct split between business and technology teams in medium to large size organizations. 

With the onslaught of outsourcing and offshoring, lot of organizations have separated the roles into different silos (development, business analyst, project management) and have gone to extreme model where they do not want generalists or people playing multiple roles!

Some of the trends that make division irrelevant are:

• New Finance/Business professionals interested/proficient in technology
• Technology professionals with finance background (MFE, MBA, CFA, FRM, CAIA, etc.)
• Millennials (those born between 1980 and 1995) entering workforce 
• Younger graduates with dual majors (Computer Science, Economics, Finance)
• Need for Self Service Applications
• Buy vs Build resulting integration of in-house and vendor products/solutions
• Agile Development is back in popularity

One of way of looking business to technology (or vice versa) is to think of a spectrum of skills/roles to be played by different individuals in the organization/team. We definitely need people at the both ends of the spectrum playing very specific roles (pure technologist developing frameworks, core components, etc. and pure business/product specialist understanding client/market needs) but I think organizations gain more if they view roles as a spectrum with individuals moving along the spectrum based on the needs of the organization.

Large organizations achieve organize themselves into distinct business and technology organizations all the way from top (CTO, CIO reporting CEO) and realize that it is difficult to innovate and bring products/solutions to market rapidly. They struggle to merge technology and business back into smaller, nimbler and agile teams!