On IT Alignment
Over the past ten to twelve years, multitudes of IT executive surveys have identified one of the greatest challenges confronting chief information officers throughout the world is to assure that the priorities of their information technology organizations are in line with the business strategies of their corporations. Several polls have ranked "Aligning IT and Corporate Goals" as their top concern, while almost polls have identified the same concern in the top 3 results. The fact that this urgent message has remained a top concern over the years indicates that very little success has been made to address alignment.
In the aforementioned surveys, most IT executives around the world indicated they were concerned about the lack of their department's contribution to the effectiveness of their companies. In fact, a majority felt the users of technology within their companies would rate the overall effectiveness of information systems only as average or acceptable, rather than good to excellent. This shows that from the IT executives' perspective, things are not improving but are getting worse. CIOs are frustrated at the slow pace of getting this important strategic corporate resource aligned with the business strategies of their companies.
I recently had a discussion with a CIO of a global company, who understandably wants to remain anonymous. He suggested that, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, IT still acts like a back-office support organization, reacting to cost pressures daily rather than developing a robust IT strategy that aligns with corporate strategy and sticking to it. As are many CIOs, he is pressured by other business executives to deliver more while the CEO demands doing so with less, and focus is moved to showing immediate results rather than what might be better, and even lower cost, over a longer period of time.
Educating line management on technology’s possibilities and limitations is hard, and so is setting priorities for projects, developing resources and skills, and integrating systems with corporate strategy. It’s even tougher to keep business and IT aligned as business strategies and technology evolve.
Is it even possible to achieve and maintain alignment? By building the right relationships and processes, and providing the necessary training, experience in many companies has proven that it can be done. Several components in those successful organizations include:
· Relationship managers embedded in the IT organization;
· Annual or more frequent updates to formal IT strategy to reflect (and even influence) changing corporate strategy ;
· Implementation of appropriate processes for governance, demand management and other IT disciplines;
· Regular and frequent reviews of IT costs and performance metrics with business.
In the world of do more with less, focusing on relationships and processes that enhance mutual understanding between business and IT is key.
