What Does It Mean To "Align Business Need With It Services"

What is IT-business alignment and why is it important?

It'due south more important than e'er that It and the business operate from the aforementioned playbook. So why do so many organizations struggle to achieve It-business alignment?

Like many leading It executives, RJ Juliano doesn't distinguish between applied science objectives and business objectives only views them equally i and the aforementioned.

"We demand to be well past alignment to where the objectives are unified and indistinguishable," said Juliano, senior vice president and principal information and marketing officer at Parkway Corp., a parking garage operator and real estate developer in Philadelphia.

In Juliano's experience, a combined It-business concern approach builds stronger teams and promotes meaningful dialogue too equally delivers competitive advantages and long-term sustainability of the company and make.

"The right human relationship accelerates and enables the accomplishment of company goals, engages customers and employees, and drives innovation in both product and process," he said, calculation that separating engineering from business outcomes typically does the opposite.

Sharon Stufflebeme, managing manager in the technology consulting practice at the consultancy Protiviti, said the CIO's part today is to conceptualize, influence and deliver on the company'south business concern strategy.

Sharon Stufflebeme headshot Sharon Stufflebeme

"Simply CIOs tin't anticipate, influence or deliver on things if they don't know what those needs are," she said. For that to happen, at that place needs to be IT-business alignment throughout the organization.

What is IT-business organisation alignment?

Executives, management consultants and researchers have long stressed the demand for It and the other business functions to align their priorities and strategies.

Information technology is no longer a supporting player within the enterprise but office of the chief engine. Indeed, figurer engineering science has driven business organization growth for decades, with the internet and digitalization transforming both how people piece of work and how they appoint with organizations and each other. That makes IT-business alignment paramount to business success.

"It's the assurance that the technology beingness delivered enables the business to succeed," said Rebecca Gasser, CIO of Omnicom Health Group, of the benefits of Information technology-business alignment. "Some of this is foundational similar networks and infrastructure, but a lot of this is the engineering science that provides a competitive reward to the business organization," she said.

Darren Topham headshot Darren Topham

Information technology-business alignment, although widely recognized every bit disquisitional today, has not been the norm within nearly organizations until recent years, said Darren Topham, a senior research managing director at Gartner, a tech inquiry and advisory firm.

In its earliest decades, the IT department focused on delivering calculating hardware, software and services as a utility. Under this paradigm, technology was a tool that aided workers in their usual tasks, with reliability and uptime being the main measures of IT's success, Topham said.

Even so, that epitome evolved over the years, and in item in the 21st century, every bit more technology executives teamed with their C-level and concern colleagues to use technology to reengineer work, products and services.

This led to a slew of disruption, every bit startups introduced entirely new business models and as legacy companies transformed their own processes and market offerings.

CIOs and their Information technology teams must still evangelize utilitarian technology services, Topham said. Just they must also now accept the capacity to strategize how applied science can shape what the enterprise offers for products and services as well as how it delivers those offerings.

"This is where alignment is manifested," he explained. "It's where anybody from both sides is bringing something to the table for communal benefits. At that place'south no 'them' and 'united states of america.'"

Topham added: "The ultimate expression for this is the term digital business organization."

Why is It business alignment important?

IT-business organisation alignment ensures that the Information technology organization and business organization units are working together and moving in the same direction at the required speed.

Rebecca Gasser headshot Rebecca Gasser

"Technology can be exciting, but often it is expensive and not equally fit for purpose equally originally hoped. By partnering and being aligned, the concern and the technology team tin ensure the ROI is present, it is supported and it is the right fit for the business," Gasser said.

Surveys and studies support the importance of Information technology-business alignment.

According to the Gartner report "The CIO'south Role in Preparing for Digital Business Dispatch," more seventy% of senior leaders "recognize digital technology as integral to revenue achievement, product development, customer engagement and advancing strategic operational processes."

In its "2021 Evolution of CIO Responsibilities Survey," Gartner noted that 83% of responding CIOs said they "increasingly work on enterprise-level initiatives beyond their traditional IT delivery executive roles."

Meanwhile, "IT'due south changing mandate in an historic period of disruption," a 2021 written report from The Economist Intelligence Unit of measurement based on a survey of more than 1,000 Information technology decision-makers and senior business executives, found that 83% believe adapting to external change requires moderate-to-considerable Information technology infrastructure and apps improvement.

"Information technology has to serve every business organisation function as technology has now become pervasive," said Protiviti's Stufflebeme. It-business concern alignment helps ensure that the organization gets the correct technology at the correct time so it can encounter its key functioning indicators and attain its business transformation goals and objectives -- whether those are improving customer service or developing new revenue streams.

Stufflebeme said the lack of Information technology-business organisation alignment creates significant barriers to market place success for organizations.

"When alignment is missing, the technology might work but it might not deliver an outcome the business concern needs," she said. "You take solutions that end up being bridges to nowhere, yous take concern problems that aren't properly solved, or you have concern initiatives -- whether it's a price saving or efficiency improving [program] -- that aren't properly executed."

The benefits and challenges of IT-business alignment — The alignment of Information technology and business brings many benefits, simply challenges grow.

What are the benefits of Information technology-business alignment?

Experts cited the following benefits that come with having the IT department aligned with the business functions:

Information technology reduces digital friction because Information technology is able to deliver technology that is easier for workers, customers and partners to use. "This has a huge affect on an organization'south accomplishment of objectives and productivity," Topham noted.
Customer engagement, price reduction and productivity improve.
Organizations gain more than visibility into hurting points in both concern processes and the technology that supports them.
Information technology fuels innovation, as teams are improve able to identify problems and opportunities that can be addressed through the use of technology. "You're getting to the concept of co-creation, and that creates more than value for the organization," Stufflebeme said.
Information technology results in faster delivery times and improves speed to market due to increased collaboration and innovation.
It increases ability to deliver technology that drives business strategy and goals.
It provides a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Jo Ann Saitta headshot Jo Ann Saitta

IT-business alignment allows an organisation to have an edge, said Jo Ann Saitta, managing director, EY Business organization Transformation Consulting, Health Sciences. "It allows [the enterprise] to stay electric current or fifty-fifty ahead of the bend."

What are the challenges of IT business alignment?

Despite the criticality of having a strategic alignment between It and the business concern functions, Stufflebeme said plenty of organizations still struggle to practise that.

She and others cited a number of obstacles and challenges that executives and their teams confront on this front, including the following:

RJ Juliano
lack of trust and brownie between IT and business leaders: "The biggest challenges are having a CIO who pursues and creates unity [between IT and the business] and having a corporate culture that as well expects and fosters that unity," Juliano said;
reluctance by IT or the business organization to cede control or invite input into one'southward respective functional domains: Some CIOs yet have a command-and-control approach, while some organizations still have a culture that views technology as only the realm of IT, Topham explained, adding that both mentalities demand to change to reach alignment;
lack of business apprehending inside the IT department;
lack of engineering knowledge throughout the business functions;
inability of Information technology to understand how engineering initiatives can support business goals;
inability of It to communicate how engineering science initiatives tin can back up concern goals; and
inability of Information technology to calculate the fiscal impacts (costs and ROIs) of applied science initiatives.

IT business organization alignment all-time practices

To overcome such challenges, experts offered the following best practices:

Create shared accountability and shared value realization between Information technology and the business organization. "This tin can no longer sit down but on the shoulders of the CIO," Topham said, adding that CIOs should train functional executives to manage their own technology portfolio to support shared accountability.
In addition to becoming skillful communicators, develop adept listening skills. "Information technology helps you understand what the current state is and what would expect great in a future state," Saitta said.
Embed technologists within the business units and take IT workers engage directly with their business concern unit counterparts past attending meetings and adopting Agile and DevOps practices that promote collaboration. "Then technology becomes a natural role of the business," Saitta said.
Create incentives for employees throughout the organization to work toward Information technology-business unit collaboration.

Such practices, Juliano said, tin eliminate whatever gaps between Information technology and its business concern counterparts and aid the organisation reach a place where the two are -- in his words -- "unified and duplicate."

All important goals are shared goals, he underscored, adding that the joint collaboration between IT and the business must go beyond merely buy-in to common goals to include joint accountability for the results.