Don’t Limit Your Organization’s Potential By Excluding IT From Business Solutions
A 40-year mail-order retailer was a victim of its own success. Innovative products and savvy marketing grew the business as planned, but the resulting strain of fulfillment and customer support operations taxed the company’s ability to adapt to a changing market.
It’s a common situation faced by many organizations: Business tends to focus on client satisfaction and company growth while IT focuses on keeping systems functioning–all without much interaction to better achieve goals together.
Often unintentional, this lack of alignment between IT strategy and business strategy often leads to miscommunication, delayed projects and wasted time and money. The remedy is a broader enterprise perspective that postures IT as a competitive advantage.
Understanding the Risks When the IT and Business Strategies Are Not Aligned
Several risks are at hand when IT and business strategy are not aligned properly, from missed market opportunities to unpredictable costs. Without an overall vision for the corporation, it’s hard to accurately and effectively integrate IT into multi-year company plans, says Sanjay Lobo, Distinguished SE/Enterprise Architect at HP.
“You can’t have technology for technology’s sake, especially in these difficult economic times,” he says. “We must come up with the most efficient solution to align technology based on the overall strategy objectives, costs and time considerations.”
If weakened by shortsighted funding and an absence of decision-making agility, most IT departments can’t adapt to rapidly-evolving business needs. But an enterprise-level plan is proactive enough to anticipate long-term needs. Ideally, IT and business should have the agility to push growth further and faster together. Indeed, enterprise survival requires a deeper collaboration to not only achieve goals, but also to solve problems strategically.
Aligning Two Into One
Ever get a speeding ticket that was entered into the system and immediately printed while an officer stands alongside your car with a handheld device? That’s IT synced with enterprise. Formerly a manual process, it’s one example of how Lobo says government is taking a customer-service approach to everything from law enforcement to taxes by leveraging technology as a critical part of that strategy.
But where do you start? What must be considered? At HP, one such diagnostic framework assesses the organization’s maturity level so a firm can upgrade the way it works internally when it upgrades technology. “Moving to a more mature approach is the only way to capitalize on IT investments,” Lobo says. This approach, called BATOG (Business context, Application portfolio, Technology infrastructure, Organizational capability, and Governance), achieves value and return from IT investments and also provides an effective way to communicate the strategy to business executives. Here’s an outline:
- Business takes into account core versus context activities.
- Applications support the business activities needed to run the company.
- Technology can be a source of competitive advantage in some organizations. Not so for others.
- Organization—are people outsourced? Would it be an advantage?
- Governance defines ownership of the various business processes.
Did You Know?
- Business and IT are often unaware of how one can help the other.
- Effectively integrating IT into multi-year plans requires an enterprise strategy.
- IT becomes a competitive advantage when organizational changes and technology upgrades go hand-in-hand.
Perfectly Aligned Business and IT Equal An Optimal State
For that mail-order retailer with decades of experience and sales of more than $2.5 billion, HP aligned business and IT by automating processes and outsourcing other areas that can adapt to market conditions. Now as demand increases, so does support. This move translated into millions in savings.
“When business and IT are perfectly synchronized—in other words, every business change or driver triggers a change in IT—an organization has achieved an optimal state. It is when this happens, that IT is viewed as an enabling and competitive weapon for the business rather than an impediment or purely reactive,” Lobo says. And that puts the celebration back into success.
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