Why business-IT alignment is so important?

Why alignment is so important?

Not just in general. Alignment is often said to be an interesting topic only for IT folks and not for business managers. So, why alignment is important from the point of view of the IT Function?

The answer is very simple - because you have no choice. In the open market you select your target group, you shape your proposition based on your strengths, if some clients aren’t satisfied you might not care – they are just not your clients and you should pay more attention to other ones.

At the same time in an organization you still do something which is to a large extent different from the core business, but now you have no choice. You have only one client that you have to please independently of your strengths and propositions. The only solution is to perfectly align with your client, i.e. “business”, and in ideal situation integrate with it.

So, what are the possible solutions?

IT Function has to be organized as a business itself, with three parts (strategic, tactical, operational) and with specific departments like sales, marketing, HR etc. Alignment topic is to a large extent then important WITHIN IT Function, so that marketing which sells the solutions and services understands the possibilities of operation lines, and they understand and accept the strategic vision of IT Function. Of course, in the vision of IT Function the strategy of business must play the central role here.

Different IT Functions can be created to serve different levels of maturity. Innovation and routine exploitation can rarely be done by the same people and same departments. We can see from many examples as well that it worked as a solution. The difficulty here is to establish the smooth flow of ideas and responsibilities between departments. Innovation is only temporary, which means that new ideas should constantly be found, researched and developed. Good ideas should be integrated in operations, less prospective ones should be abandoned.

Innovation is an important necessity for the survival of the more mature organizations. Numerous examples of launching a separate IT Function, i.e. separate business unit devoted to technological innovation, also support this.

And, of course, for smaller organizations, those less mature in terms of IT-awareness, or those representing industries where IT cannot provide any serious competitive benefits, here a possible solution can be to acquire all needed IT services – which are not more than a commodity in this case – from external providers. And internally in such organizations you need only a small group of IT-aware people who will coordinate the providers and, once again, will assure alignment with the organizational goals, vision and strategy.