No Titles, Only Roles - Agile Way?

Everyone a technologist - McKinsey

Every business is a software business - Lew Cirne

Information Technology (IT) has become important to overall success of an enterprise: 

• "technology is no longer simply a budget line or operational issue—it is an enabler of virtually every strategy" [3]
• "the IT organization can help make the entire enterprise more agile by helping it build modular components that can be quickly combined into “solution architectures” for specific opportunities" [7]

Despite aligning IT with business has been a key priority for IT executives [1], the rift between IT and business organizations still exists and numerous authors have stressed the need for brining IT and business teams together:

• Organizations need to cultivate in-house talent for roles that require intimate knowledge of the business and the organization and ... is to open career paths between the IT and business sides [2]
• Large, complex software projects are better served by work cells—cross-functional teams with end-to-end ownership of application modules. In a work cell, business analysts, developers, and testers work together as a tightly knit group and take responsibility for the whole process—definition of user requirements, development of code, functional testing, rework, user-acceptance testing, and the ultimate delivery of functionality to the customer [4]
• Smart Creatives are the product folks who combine technical knowledge, business expertise and creativity [5]
• Today, companies are competing across product categories, and with the rise in integrated solutions, silos are merging. Employees must be able to easily navigate functional and product boundaries to achieve the collaboration needed to deliver these more holistic solutions. Then, as boundaries begin to dissolve, and once-separate groups combine into single teams (a services, sales, and engineering team, for example), roles will need to be redefined [5]
• Digital initiatives ... call for dedicated [digital-speed] teams that are staffed with jacks-of-all-trades rather than specialists. The ideal candidate for the digital-speed team is not an IT specialist but rather a jack-of-all-trades who has both excellent technical skills and functional knowledge [8]

Though some organizations have tried to have formal job titles for business-technolgists, by and large, it is difficult for most organizations to come up with job titles that allow people to perform different roles as needed. But the job titles (and by extension, tribes/groups the individuals belong to) are sometimes the main reason that make it difficult for business and IT professionals to collaborate to achieve success on most projects. 

If enterprises adopt agile frameworks, it is possible to achieve alignment of IT and business without changing the formal HR job titles of the individuals since agile calls for cross-functional and autonomous (self-organizing and self-managing) team where a group of individuals come together to become a team by playing different roles as required and demanded by the team.

Using SCRUM/XP as an example, the following roles are typically needed on software development teams using agile: 

• Product Owner, Product Manager, Business Analyst
• Scrum Master, Project Manager
• Developer/Programmer, Tester
• Technical Writer
• Stakeholders (Customers, Sales, Marketing, and other members from business)

As Kent Beck explains in [9], 

Roles in a mature XP team aren't fixed and rigid. The goal is to have everyone contribute the best he has to offer to the team's success.

I think it is possible to achieve the goal of aligning business and IT by adopting agile methods since it doesn't require changing organization structures and official job titles - individuals play roles (different from their titles) and collaborate more effectively across organizational boundaries when they belong to "single" team given a common goal to achieve.

References

1. Can the IT-Business Marriage Be Saved, Susan Cramm, Harvard Business Review, September 2008
2. Developing talent for large IT projects, Francine Debane, Katya Defossez, and Mark McMillan, McKinsey Quarterly, August 2014
3. Management intuition for the next 50 years, Richard Dobbs, Sree Ramaswamy, Elizabeth Stephenson, and S. Patrick Viguerie, McKinsey Quarterly,  September 2014
4. Achieving success in large, complex software projects, Sriram Chandrasekaran, Sauri Gudlavalleti, and Sanjay Kaniyar, McKinsey Quarterly, July 2014
5. How Google Works, slideshare.net
6. Transforming Technology Companies: Putting People First, Nicole Bennett, Ruba Borno, Sebastian DiGrande, Jim Hemerling, and John Wenstrup, BCG Perspectives, November 2014
7. IT-Enabled Business Agility: A Sports Analogy, Stefan Deutscher, Antoine Gourévitch, Stuart Scantlebury, and Wolfgang Thiel, BCG Technology Advantage, March 2012
8. Two-Speed IT: A Linchpin for Success in a Digitized World, Antoine Gourévitch, Benjamin Rehberg, and Jean-François Bobier, BCG Technology Advantage, August 2012
9. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, Kent Beck, and Cynthia Andres, 2005