Forging better ties with IT

I have just read Susan Cramm's excellent blog on Forging Better Ties With IT. She asks business leaders two very important and challenging questions. The first question is, "Are you a customer or partner of IT?"

Your answer will determine how effective your organisation can be in serving your customers.

The answer of course should be "partner." In the words of Susan, "IT only has one customer — and that is the customer who buys the company's products and services." Serving this customer requires an effective IT-business partnership to find win-win solutions that can be sustained and return optimal value over the long-term.

I suggest business leaders who answered "customer" are not:

1. Treating IT as an organisational asset and considering the needs of all stakeholders to find win-win solutions that enhance, rather than undermine, this asset
2. Involving IT early enough in planning and decision making so that business and IT plans and resources can be aligned (supporting point 1 by doing the right things the right way)
3. Wanting to commit their very busy staff and resources to ensure successful outcomes but prefer to commit very busy IT staff (all resources are over stretched due to point 2)
4. Accepting accountability for the outcome of this approach - it is easier to transfer the responsibility for the business case and risks to IT (also the blame when it doesn't work, which is common due to points 1-3)

For 50 years the IT function has actively sought ways to align with the business and cope with increasing complexity as technology has rapidly evolved and pervaded business processes - processes that, usually, the business cannot describe, do not understand and don't know how to improve. 
Meanwhile business leaders are engaging with IT how they were 50 years ago and expecting a different result.

"The onus for strengthening the IT-business partnership is on line leaders...IT has done pretty much everything they know how to do. Unless business leaders commit to forging a better partnership with IT, whatever IT is today, it will still be tomorrow." 

See Susan's blog, Can the IT-Business Marriage Be Saved? for more on this.

Susan closes with the even more important and challenging question for business leaders: "What are you doing to forge a productive partnership with IT?"

Alignment perspectives

In my conversations with business managers and IT managers, the subject of the divide between business and IT often comes up. Business managers often have no idea why IT is working on someone else's project and not theirs, or taking too long and still not meeting their expectations, and wonder why IT can't be outsourced. IT managers are asking why the business managers don't have to agree on what is important, don't take an organisational view and get rewarded for making departmental efficiencies at the expense of other departments in the value chain (usually IT), are not held accountable for realising the benefits stated in shoddy, forgotten business cases, and continue to blame IT.


Both sides despair about the wasted opportunities and point the finger but nothing changes. These are symptoms of weak or flawed organisational governance, which is necessary to effect binding improvements in aligning both the business and IT toward the creation of real value and the achievement of the organisation's goals.


Governance drives alignment, which in turn drives the creation of value. 


Commitment and a structured approach to governance at the highest levels is required to continually drive the alignment of business and IT across various dimensions:

• Strategy and goals
• Processes and operations
• Portfolios of plans
• Resources and budgets
• Organisational structures, behaviours, and rewards
• Performance measurement
• Risk management
• Benefits realisation
• Decision making and lines of accountability.

A useful frame of reference for starting discussion with business and IT managers and creating awareness of alignment opportunities and challenges, and the need for sound governance to ensure continual alignment of these dimensions, is Venkatraman's Strategic Alignment model.


Venkatraman's model recognises that value from IT investments cannot be achieved if the strategies of the business and IT do not align and if there is no dynamic process to ensure continual alignment.


The model illustrates four alignment perspectives:

1. Strategy Execution - How will business strategy drive organisational design and change, and how will IT infrastructure and processes need to support that?
2. Technology Potential - How will business strategy drive IT strategy, to that the required IT infrastructure and processes can be determined?
3. Competitive Potential - How will IT trends and capabilities influence or transform the business model and operations?
4. Service Level - How to build IT capability to support fast changing demands of end-users?

The model is useful when aligning strategies by opening minds to the various alignment perspectives and considerations. It becomes even more useful when managers use it to drill down to understand what that means and what changes will be needed in the various dimensions for business and IT.

4 Steps to IT Alignment

Check out Hank Marquis' presentation, 4 Steps to IT Alignment, on managing IT operations based on business value to help address four of the perennial top 10 IT management goals:

1. Aligning with the business
2. Controlling costs
3. Improving quality
4. Balancing resource allocation

Business Services Management (BSM) is a term used to focus IT Service Management (ITSM) initiatives on business value. "BSM is a mindset not a product set" according to Peter Armstrong, BMC, the man who is attributed to inventing the term. I like the term BSM because of its business orientation, which is a key aspect of the approach outlined in this presentation.

Hank's recommended approach is:

1. Define the customer facing services with the customer, in customer terms, the supporting resource facing services, and understand the business case for each service (Hank refers to the SID/eTOM model)
2. Get the customer to value and prioritise the (customer facing) services in terms of risk to the business, taking into account confidentiality, integrity and availability (refers to CRAMM)
3. Measure service quality starting with the most important service (refers to SERVQUAL)
4. Justify projects in terms the business understand and follow best practice.

Keep in mind the term "IT alignment" in this presentation is about aligning IT services with business needs. This presentation is not about aligning IT strategy with business strategy or about aligning the portfolio of IT-enabled investments with business and IT goals and the business's role in this, so this approach alone is not sufficient to achieve alignment of the whole IT portfolio, but it is a good approach for getting your ITSM initiatives in tune with the business.