The Evolution of IT Alignment

Businesses are going through an evolutionary period, especially in today’s market. Businesses have to face change at an ever increasing speed. The technology of business has had a massive impact. Its constant improvements have lead to much efficiency in businesses but at times cost dearly. We are hearing of the job losses and cuts but are they the best solutions. It provides an immediate cessation to money going out of the business. But are we throwing the baby out with the bath water?

More and more business are having to take a look at their businesses and how they utilise their resources. IT for a long time has been the black hole of business both in understanding and money. But in reality businesses needed to take control and look at the value that the technology was bringing to the business. In other words value for money, are we improving our processes, saving money or even making money with our technology decisions.

Alignment is the next stage, aligning the strategy of our technology to business, moving from “Reactive” to “Alignment”. Seeing that the business strategy and direction are deciding factors to our technology spend and direction. IT no longer can stand-alone in its decisions and direction it needs to provide real value to the business and business needs to drive the IT Vision. But alignment is not the only thing we need to do. The second part of alignment is building an agile business prepared to change as the business needs. This ability is brought about by having a sound architecture and Governance over IT. Our decisions in that architecture needs to provide the best outcomes but with the most flexible options. This is accomplished by having our solutions delivered in a tiered fashion, freeing the business from brands as the solution is provided to a model. In this way technology can change direction as much as the business. Business can take advantage of improvements as they appear, moving to the business drivers and not the technology companies’ drivers and directions.

Once the business and IT has then been aligned the next step in this evolution is collaboration. The business needs to evolve further to take advantage of technology and what it has to offer. Technology can have a high price, but it does have its advantages. It is the balance of business to technology that a good CIO brings to the table. Businesses need to utilise this resource and invite the CIO to the executive level to have input into the business and how it can maximise its technology even further. The CIO’s role is a conduit to the technology, their role is applying technology to business strategy but if they are not included in the planning the business is losing out.

So to complete this evolution to a collaborative and blended strategy businesses need to embrace technology, align their values and direction then maximise the understanding of what technology can do for the business based on those alignments and values.

Business need to admit IT mis-alignment before they can align

This point is critical both for the business and the executive in that buisness. In the ITIL book "Best Practices for Applicaiton Management" there is a phrase which articulates this perfectly.

"IT is not technology itself that supplies returns to a buisness,

but how technology is employed to meet business requirements."

Study by IBM and The Economist

The biggest issue is getting the buy-in by business to realise that there is a disjoint to how the business and IT need to work as one.

This alignment can be carried out in a number steps

1. Identify the different applications used by the business
2. look identify the diffeent busienss owners
3. finally identify the customers both internal and external

From this exercise we can then start to build a map of the physical systems and the flow of data through those systems. This looks to be the foundation to then start to understand how the business is using the technology and from there I would see we can then identify the value to the business and then start to build an alignment map and strategy.

A business cannot realise value from its IT until it has been algined. This was argued in 1993 by Henderson and Venkatraman of Harvard Unitversity, any search for these names with IT alignement will find more details.

This article is more a question, I understand the need its just getting the common view point and how that is achieved.