IT - Business Alignment

IT-Business alignment is often cited as one of the top priorities for IT, this is true for organizations across the board. It makes me wonder why IT so "mis-aligned" with business? after all we do not hear terms like "manufacturing aligning with business" or "finance aligning with business" etc. 

Recently, I had an opportunity to meet few fellow enterprise architects from various large companies at a conference. Casual talk turned into a discussion on IT - Business alignment issues and how business does not understand IT etc. One of the architects made a good comment - "why do you see IT and business separately, last time I checked  paycheck for both IT and business folks come from the same source". I found this comment pretty amusing and it made a lot of sense.

So, what is the cause for this mis-alignment and how IT can better align with business (since, IT is a supporting activity it cannot be the other way around). Every business vertical domain, Finance, Supply chain, Manufacturing, Accounting, Marketing etc., has professionals trained in this domain (ex. MBA in FInance, APICS, etc.). Generally, most IT folks are trained exclusively in technology. The disconnect starts from here. Fresh technology graduates, look for implementing or working on perceived cool technologies, weather it provides business value or not. A reason for IT-Business mis-alignment - IT professionals are not trained in business and do not have adequate business knowledge.

Historically,  businesses organized their operations based on  siloed vertical functions like finance, manufacturing etc. However business processes spanned across these silos, and the touch points often were the cause for in-efficiencies in operations. With IT automating existing processes, while there was dramatic increase in productivity, it also amplified the inefficiencies. Another reason for IT-business mis-alignment - automating inefficient processes. Newer practices and technologies like BPM, EA modeling emerged mainly to address these issues.

Another important issue for IT is to deal with is changes from both sides - technology and business. Capacity planing for IT is a challenge and without good synergy, it is hard for IT to anticipate what is coming down the pipe. This is another major cause for the mis-alignment. The list goes on......

For better IT-business alignment, IT should proactively engage with the business (among other things). Most often, IT engagement is top down - business sees a hole in existing IT system and provides a set of requirements for IT to fix/implement it. For better synergy, IT engagement should be proactive rather than reactive. Some steps towards this direction, IT should anticipate system changes based on wider corporate goals and get engaged with LOB owners, maybe a meeting once a quarter (or semi-annually) to discuss current state and also learn planned strategic business direction from LOB owners, share planned IT investments, technology innovations that would benefit these business owners and solicit feedback. Use this knowledge for proactively updating IT infrastructure.

Another important step for IT professionals is to step into the shoes of the actuall business users, meet external customers whenever there is an opportunity.  This will help us in IT understand business pressures and beter serve the needs of the business.... and hopefuly put an end to IT-Business (mis)alignment talks.