Business IT alignment: Who cares?

Business IT alignment is a topic that generates heated debates and outright ridicule sometime. There is a Gartner fellow, who declared, "None of you are in IT, all of you are in business". Then some one else claims why IT is so special, no one talks about aligning Finance and Accounting to business. The general feeling is that, it is a non issue.

I beg to disagree. All of these commentators are missing the point. IT and business need alignment, specifically because IT is not like other support functions of business. IT is not finance, accounting, HR or legal. IT IS special. And why is that so?

It is because IT is not only useful operationally or tactically, but can provide significant strategic and competitive advantages. It is not only useful in automating operations or producing relevant management information but also can add new market segments to business, open up new distribution channels, or sometimes add new lines of business. It is this capacity of IT that should allow IT to go ahead on its own strategic vision. IT going on its own and doing its own thing, is good for business. That unfortunately gives rise to issue of alignment.

Business leaders need to understand making IT just an 'order taker' for business removes any incentive for IT to contribute in this unique way that no other support function can. Enterprise IT function can use the building blocks available in market place to create the differentiators for the business. This unique function can not be totally trusted to a vendor.

This is especially true in case of banking, financial services and insurance sector, where essentially business is nothing without IT (and of course a lot of capital). Most business in this segment derive their USP from IT and must treat it as strategic asset (and most do). So when attempting to align business and IT, don't make IT totally subservient to business. There are multiple perspectives of alignment. IT being sensitive to business strategy is necessary but not sufficient. IT strategy must also respond to external IT world and bring relevant changes into business, whether dictated by business strategy or not. So business leaders need to be even handed and do a 'complete double loop' of alignment so that IT strategy has a chance to make difference to business, and IT is not just taking orders from business.

As business and IT strategies can be at loggerheads at times and that will make alignment difficult. But make no mistake, business IT alignment is required for optimal results and IT strategy need to be given some degree of freedom.

Retrospective

Here is a retrospective on some of the blog posts.
Incidentally most of them are also top content on this blog per reader's choice.
So if you are a recent visitor, there might be a gem you may have missed ;-)

1. Agile, iterative or waterfall
   
2. City planning and slum control
   
3. Centralised service delivery team
   
4. Requirements management is crucial
   
5. Challenges in using services as integration mechanism
   
6. Requirements elicitation
   
7. SOA in enterprises or Hype 2.0
   
8. BPM or workflow
   
9. SOA and demonstrating ROI
   
10. SOA Fable: Do you wear a watch
    

Open group conference

In these recessionary times, taking short term view and conserving cash is the mantra. However negligence of architectural matters and short term view, actually adds to long term woes and costs. The way you would not stop essential maintenance of critical components, you must keep maintaining your enterprise architecture. Architectural spend prepares your IT organisation for long term survival and efficiency. However winning this argument is not easy.

This week I will be speaking at The Open Group's Enterprise Architecture Practitioner's conference about my experiences on how to navigate architectural transformations through sanctioning processes in these tough times. There is another panel discussion on same subject. If any of the readers are around, I would be happy to meet up in person.