Thanks again to the Business Ecology Initiative and BPM/SOA Consortium for giving me a collaborative platform to discuss this very important topic.  After a great discussion in response to the "Decoding Business/IT Unity" presentation, and I look forward to hearing how it sounds on the podcast.  Here are some of the more salient (and perhaps controversial) thoughts:

• Expecting to address a major challenge with one tool is naive at best.  There are many tools, experts, and adherents.  And yet, the symptoms of project failure have not improved dramatically in almost a decade.
• Complexity is Complicated.  It is non-linearly dependent on Depth of Context - such as number of people, organizations, stakeholders, viewpoints, etc. involved.
• Complexity cannot be eliminated - as long as there is context (e.g. there are people involved.)
• Complexity is, however, manageable with capability-based approaches, because they integrate a number of approaches to address the challenge at hand.
• So Business / IT Unity is a very specific point of the Business / IT Alignment gradient that is only possible with very shallow Depth of Context.  
• And finally, Business / IT Alignment is not just an IT problem.  It takes two to tango.

AAB