Business Technology Alignment

Business-IT Alignment can be defined as

an agreement between business and IT leaders to work together to achieve organizational goals through the use of Information Technology

Business- IT Alignment is considered the holy grail of IT business management. Business and IT leaders are constantly looking for ways to ensure that investments in IT lead to run, growth, or transformational results. There are various models that attempt to align the "goals" that business leaders want to achieve with the "means" that IT and Operations should deliver.

Some organizations use the business- IT convergence model instead of alignment, which means that business and IT can converge into a single strategic entity instead of being two separate planning entities. The term business-IT collaboration is also used in place of alignment, focusing on close collaboration between business and IT.

A few things should be considered here:

• The thought process and vocabulary of business leaders relates to business model (value creation), operating model (value delivery), and business strategy (alignment).

• IT vocabulary includes IT concepts such as infrastructure, applications, stacks, IT components, licenses, IT services, IT risks and controls.

• Financial vocabulary includes charts of accounts, accumulation and aggregation of costs by service (IT Services), function (IT Tower) and purpose (IT Cost Pool)

• A common layer can bring together IT, business and financial perspectives for planning purposes Business Capability can fill this gap to create a common language that brings together Business, IT and Finance (Figure 1).

Read more about Business Capabilities in PLAN Concepts

Some guidelines to align strategy and architecture

1. Scope Alignment - The scope and activities of business and technology strategies should be aligned. Inputs from business strategy such as business disruptions related to market, financials, competitive advantage and operating model should drive technology choices and decisions leading to target architecture

2. Outcome driven - both strategy and architecture should be outcome driven. Consider google OKR (objective key results) model as a simple but effective way to link objectives and outcomes which should drive strategy and architecture.

3. Fix the Basics - while a lot of attention is paid to new technologies, do not forget the address the issues related to legacy platforms

4. Keep an eye on disruptions - continuously monitor known and emerging disruptions which can interrupt your business and assess its impact on business and technology.