It is hard to communicate between business and IT
It is hard to communicate with people from other industry. There is domain knowledge barier which will negatively impact execution of most IT project.
Symptoms
IT people who are present during meetings about requirements do not participate actively
IT people promote upgrading technology instead of improving end to end usability of the system
the terminology in the code and database is different from the language used by business people
Negative results
fixing each bug requires the work of several people
new software developers need a few months before they are effective in working on the code
integration with another IT systems is so hard that it is unprofitable despite automating manual work
Causes
software developers are not interested in the business domain they are currently working on
there is no time to train programmers on business knowledge
there are no Entity Relationship Diagrams which would explain relationships between business objects and business events
there is no established vocabulary
This is my advice:
Steps to perform
create Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) of the business domain ASAP - check how to start
make sure that Subject Matter Experts understand the ERD and that everything looks correct
organize meetings with software developers to show them the diagram and to talk about it
Positive results
the names used in the code, UI labels and database tables and fields names are consistent
software developers understand the business language
software developers understand what information is needed by the business and they start improving usability of the system
Challenges
there might be a need to gradually migrate existing database to better model
single person has to spend from 2 to 4 weeks on creating Entity Relationship Diagram - this is iterative work - I offer end to end consulting support
non-IT people will have to learn Crow foot notation and support creation of ERD diagram
The benefits of not changing anything
people can continue using many synonyms for the same thing
we avoid asking about very basic things where lack of our knowledge may be embarrassing
we retain for a group of insiders the understanding of certain aspects of work in the organization