[michaelochurch]

What, exactly, is so wrong with business setting the agenda of what gets built?

I don't think that it's good when the business (usually, this means the executives) do it unilaterally. Obviously, it's not good for engineers to build with no concern whatsoever as to whether they're building something useful. It needs to be a collaboration focused around letting each side do what it's good at.

I'd like to believe that enough of us have sufficient business sense that we don't need the Agile-style waterfall (no, that's not a contradiction) in which requirements flow from business into "product" into technology. Not all of us make sound economic choices, but I think that a large part of that comes from the fact that most companies promote people with any business sense "out of IT".

As one who's trying to look forward for us as technologists, I guess I'd say that we need to take some responsibility for learning business and politics. The head-in-sand strategy is bad for us individually, but also bad for us as a group.