The Importance of Business & IT Alignment

Demonstrating the business value of IT-business alignment is essential to fostering an environment that is open to organizational change. 

Consider implementing the following steps to help bring IT efforts and business objectives into alignment: 

Evaluate: Making an objective assessment of your current corporate culture is the first step to identifying potential areas of improvement. How do departments interact or communicate? What opportunities do they have to share ideas, troubleshoot problems, explain limitations, or brainstorm solutions? Which roles would benefit from receiving training or participating in meetings outside of their departments and how could that best be accomplished?

Communicate: Effective business-IT alignment is going to require more than an announcement that it's expected to happen. Re-examine the current chain of command to see if roles between departments could be more closely integrated in daily communications, schedule decision-making meetings for various managers or top producers, and invite employees to make suggestions on how different departments could facilitate in accomplishing the objectives of each team or project. Define key performance metrics or indicators that serve as evidence that business-IT alignment benefits not only the organization as a whole, but also the different departments working together to achieve common goals. 

Identifying KPIs shared between teams is another effective method of encouraging greater alignment. Highlighting the shared benefits of improving collaboration can help inspire the commitment and effort necessary to enact lasting change. 

Moderate: Assigning a business relationship manager (BRM) to act as an enabler in establishing a roadmap of communication between IT leaders and business leaders may be a necessary part of making a business transformation that includes both departments. Creating a role to research, monitor, and encourage interaction between departments adds some validity to the commitment of making ongoing collaborative efforts a reality.

Validate: Emphasize the success of your organization’s business-IT alignment efforts by sharing metrics that help quantify the effects of changes in communication and collaboration between teams. Witnessing the transformation as it takes place adds a sense of momentum to the importance of improved communication.