IT-business alignment: it's the process, stupid
...to paraphrase something that some US President or other might possibly have said.
CBDi analyst Richard Veryard
responded to my
recent blog entry on the validity of MWD's strapline ("advising on IT-business alignment).
I think he partly agrees, but I also think he misses something fundamental about the IT-business alignment thing. It's my fault: I didn't make it clear, at all, in my previous post.
Alignment is a process of refinement, not a journey with a fixed destination.Richard says:
But the difficulty
[with my "three aspects to alignment" perspective]
is that alignment connotes synchronization and inhibits innovation. Business and IT simply don't work to the same timetable. Alignment is symmetric - if you align A to B, this means B has to be aligned to A. That's okay if you don't ever want to change your business strategy (which many old-fashioned IT strategy planning methods assumed) or experiment with new forms of IT in advance of any business requirement. But it's hardly appropriate for the dynamic volatile world that IT vendors and consultants claim to support.When we talk about alignment - and this is a critical part of our forthcoming book as well as the stuff we do in our day-jobs - we're talking about the
process of bringing IT closer to how the business works. That's subtly but profoundly different from transforming IT to a "fixed point". Yes, there is an attempt at synchronisation here: but it's an attempt to synchronise movement, or at least minimise latency between movement, of business and IT. The core is an attempt to synchronise the process of change management, if you like.
This is explicitly brought out in the third of the three aspects: aligning IT change with business change. Yes, as Richard points out,
"business and IT simply don't work to the same timetable". That's the point: aligning IT with business is all about the process of bringing these two timetables closer together. Mostly from the IT perspective, as it's business which has to have the last word.
In most organisations, though, there's work to be done in understanding what a "timetable" even looks like, metaphorically speaking, before anything else can happen...
