Is IT – Business Alignment Meaningless?
I recently read a blog post that hit a nerve with me. Its link is IT-Business Alignment is Not a Meaningless Catchphrase. In this post, the author defends against the notion that IT – business alignment is passé and out of date. I agree with his argument. Alignment is the cornerstone of my consulting business because experience has taught me that it is a major issue. I decided on that business model after many years of running IT as well as other business units. I observed the need to improve the understanding our IT staff had of its customer’s needs. I’ve already had one post on the topic.
I believe that much of the discounting of the importance of IT-business alignment comes from the frameworks themselves. They don’t include much about personal relationships because they are just formal IT frameworks. They are meant to be customized for each individual company. If all that is implemented is a framework, what you have is just a formal contract. Such contracts are definitely needed and important. They govern formal expectations and deliverables. They provide the metrics to measure those deliverables. However, trust must also be present for there to be success. To have trust there must first be relationships and communications. That is where most formal IT approaches fall short. The diagram below provides a simple map for those relationships in a typical company. Professional service companies may be the exceptions to this diagram but manufacturing and manufacturing related service companies are represented.
In order for IT to be perceived as aligned and useful for the organization, the entire organization must perceive that to be so. That means all organizational levels must agree. That means there must be a willingness to understand and to trust IT. That means that appropriate relationships between IT and their customers must exist and those relationships are different. In aggregate they do fall into two major categories. Any individual relationship may vary, but when we focus on groups, these categories hold true. The leadership groups are similar, differing only by how much of the company’s P&L statement they own. The big change is when we focus on the people who actually make the day to day operations run. Those people may understand some version of a “big picture” but their real focus in on a very limited set of functions related to their job. They also represent the bulk to the IT group’s customers.
The message here is that IT-business alignment is important but isn’t achieved without trusting relationships between IT and their customers. Those relationships don’t exist without IT initiating the effort to build them. It’s a part that is easily ignored if we only focus on the formal part of IT best practices. These “softer” skills are a vital element in the equation.
Let me know what you think and stay tuned for more…
