I found this to be a great and insightful article...but for a slightly different reason.

If a wise IT professional encounters the kind of problems in understanding with business users as has been related above, imagine what happens when some of these business users, often in upper echelons, make IT-centric decisions in searching for solutions to a business need.

IT professionals who have earned their scars and stripes know that knowledge of the business is at least as important as technical dexterity and skill. Oftentimes more. Buying a vendor's shiny product or hiring a bunch of code grunts who are skilled in the latest BI tool is no substitute for people who have innate knowledge of your particular business. And sometimes there is no easy answer to a company's IT needs.

Many a project has floundered not for lack of IT skills but for lack of understanding how the company needs to use its own data. Happy is the business that has a knowledgable and forthcoming base of users and cultivates (as much as is possible or practical) its own technical staff...and encourages them to work together to know each other's spheres. It has been my pleasure to work at some of those.