---
published: true
layout: post
title: The Divide Between Business and IT Is Just an Accountability Sink
date: 2025-04-24T09:00:00.000Z
tags:
  - Accountability
  - Business
  - Engineeriing
image: https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/algorotoscope-master/stalin-time-city-fog-sun.jpeg
---
I have worked to identify, discuss, and narrow the classic line between business and IT for this entire century. Every bit of my work as the API Evangelist has been focused on reducing the barriers for business stakeholders to get more involved in the API conversation, and encourage engineering, IT, and developer stakeholders to get more involved in the business conversations. After 25 years of doing this and seeing the pushback from both sides on why they shouldn’t be crossing the line, I am convinced that this line is intentional and it is purely there as an accountability sink. 

If you aren’t familiar with accountability sinks I recommend reading [The Unaccountability Machine, Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind by Dan Davies](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo252799883.html). The TL;DR is that accountability sinks are how executive leadership of corporations avoid being accountable for the decisions made on the ground of their enterprises, something that has spread to all functions of enterprise operations. Markets leverage accountability sinks. Enterprises leverage accountability sinks. Artificial intelligence is the ultimate accountability sink. Accountability sinks prevent us from having to be held accountable for the decisions we make, and have led to the distrust of institutions and government we are experiencing today.

Having a line between business and IT has long kept business people from being accountability for that technological black box over there, and has long kept IT from being accountable for real world business and human impact. When anything goes wrong within an enterprise you can rely on business people pointing the finger at IT, and you can rely on technical people pointing the finger at poor business decisions. Most people like things this way. Sure, there are some people like me who want to work together and close the divide, but this is the minority. Most people are perfectly happy with this arrangement, and artificial intelligence is the next generation of this arrangement. Moving forward everyone will have a personal accountability sink at their disposal, where they will be able to point the finger, and absolve themselves of any accountability.