IT-business alignment - is it just fluff?
An anonymous commenter on my recent "
SOA petition" post here proffered:
Could you drop the "IT-business alignment" waffle as well? That would make things just perfect.
We've been aware for some time that the term "IT business alignment" is in danger of becoming yet another one of those "look at me, I'm a strategic thinker" platitudes, tossed casually into conversations to make peoples' heads nod in meetings. And yes, it did cross my mind, given our
increasingly high-profile stance against gratuitous buzzphrase invention, that we might be
hoist by our own petard on this one.
But we're going to stick by our strapline: "advising on IT-business alignment". Why? Because that's what we aspire to do, and we can't find a succinct way to say it using other words. And also because we're not just throwing those words around: we're actively trying to educate ourselves, our customers and industry in general about what it *means* to optimise IT within businesses, for maximum benefit to those businesses. And, most of all: because "alignment" is what businesses are telling us they want from IT.
At the very highest level, at MWD we explain the challenge and the process of alignment in terms of improving the *relationship* between a business and its IT provider organisation(s). That means we're not talking about the problem or the solution in technology terms. Why? Because the real problems in real organisations which lead to IT failing to deliver business value aren't about technology: they're about organisation and culture.
There are three elements to the story:
- aligning IT investment with business strategy
- aligning IT delivery with business priorities
- aligning IT change with business change.
We strive to bring all our research and consulting back to a central question: "how does this improve the business value that organisations can get out of their IT investments?". Our very
first report attempted to put a stake in the ground on this point, and we've been refining and building on our ideas ever since.
We know we're not alone in thinking this is an important topic: we (along with Dale Vile at our partner
Freeform Dynamics) have been contracted by Wiley & Sons to write a book about it...watch this space. It's shaping up to be a really fun project.
On that note, if you have practical experience of the challenges organisations face in achieving this objective and ways of addressing them then we would love to talk to you.
