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.