Who is the driver (Business or IT)?

Who is the driver (Business or IT)?

Old Paradigm: 

It is common today within organizations of all sizes that there is a lack of clarity about who is the driver, Business or IT when it comes to executing strategic and tactical initiatives needing support from information & technology group. This influx creates a rift between business functions and IT, seen commonly at almost all levels. 

Business thinks of IT as one of the service department with expectations to deliver IT services rapidly with consistent quality. For business groups, there is no clear and measurable mechanism in place to relate IT initiatives to the growth of the organization or impact on brand equity as well as customer loyalty and employee satisfaction. All this leads to is forming an informal but practical prejudice about IT that IT is a cost center responding very slow to the business needs and never listens to the true needs of the business. 

IT team on the other hand equally feels frustrated and excluded. IT believes that their role is limited or non-existent in driving key initiatives of the organization. Often, IT group experiences that they are the last one to know about the management strategy and the vision. IT group experiences continuous discontent with business groups as the efforts of IT are not well recognized and often key projects get shelved for no reason. IT leadership has to continuously ration the IT spending as they are not funded enough. This results in IT leading their initiatives based on priorities set by IT leadership which may be far different than the expectations of the business. IT believes that the expectations of business groups are somewhat unrealistic as business doesn't understand the complexities of IT and hence has limited respect for the value of IT for the success of the organization.

This state of confusion and disconnect between business groups and IT directly impacts the top-line and bottom-line growth of the organization. Very few organization realize this issue on-time and hence resort to find the solution. Our assessment of over 300 + mid-size to enterprise organizations reveal that this disconnect is found in 90% to 95% organization world-wide.

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New Paradigm:

In today's day and age the role of Information, Technology and AI has become an integral part of the executive level priorities. With massive data inflow, elevated consumer expectations, market volatility, competitive marketplace, the influence of social media on the brand equity and infusion of emerging technologies, business groups and IT groups have to be on the same table, working hand-in-hand to deliver on the common strategy to deliver the vision of the organization. This change in the surrounding environment drives the need for complete, 360 degree Business IT Alignment for all organizations. 

Implementing this new model of Business IT Alignment is possible by making a few fundamental changes within an organization. After implementing this model IT will not be looked at as a support only department. Instead, IT will get a seat on the board of executives helping drive key business initiatives from the front. This heavily impacts how companies would need to staff. Instead of handling all technical, functional, development and support activities in-house by hiring an army of IT resources, executive leadership can now make powerful smart decisions by hiring high-caliber, business focused analysts having a deep understanding of business processes and complete knowledge of the systems in place. Business analysts work directly with the leadership team to drive key business initiatives, instilling a culture of clear hand-offs and collaborative environment. This model empowers companies with a choice of selecting trusted partners for supporting day-to-day Infrastructure, Cloud, Applications, Databases, and Analytics services, hence eliminating the need for hiring a large IT team. Program and project managers play a vital role in implementing this model by designing SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for partners and consistently monitor their performance. Most importantly, the executive team now has one lens to monitor the performance of IT by relating it directly with the success of key organizational top-line and bottom-line growth initiatives. 

With our experience of working with leading organizations this model has been validated multiple times by our customers. Our experience in designing and delivering this model for our customers has not only resulted in end-to-end Business IT Alignment, but also resulted in significantly reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of IT. 

If you need assistance with implementing the above model, feel free to contact us. 

Author: Rahul Kaul

Email: rlkaul1@gmail.com

Seattle, WA

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahul-kaul-3366562