When someone in your IT organisation refers to another part of the company as "the business," I want to know who gets to decide what to build.
The phrase often reflects a separation between strategy and delivery. Marketing, sales, or operations choose the work; IT estimates it and delivers. The people making commitments may rarely see a user struggle with the product or hear an engineer explain why a requested change will disrupt another workflow.
This repeats the separation of planning from execution associated with Taylor's scientific management. In software development, building a partial solution often reveals something that changes the plan. A prototype exposes a missing step. An integration uncovers a constraint. A customer uses the feature differently from what anyone expected.
If delivery is treated as a cost centre executing tickets, that evidence has to travel back across the organisational boundary before it can change a commitment. Sometimes it arrives after the budget and scope have been fixed. Sometimes the team is told to deliver what was agreed anyway.
The organisation can then measure success through utilisation, predictability, and delivery against the original request, even when the team has learned that the request will not solve the problem. Who can reconsider the investment? Who is responsible for checking whether the delivered feature helps?
Business says: "Digital built it wrong."
Digital says: "We built exactly what you asked."
Everyone is technically correct. The product or initiative still fails.