Technology in today’s world is integrated fully into our lives, but can you say the same about your company? In many workplaces, it’s common for business process departments to be fully separate from the IT department, with the business folks unable to see into the black box of the IT office, and the IT people not understanding what’s even going on on the other side of the building.
Traditionally, business professionals and IT departments operated in their own functional silos, each dedicated to their own area of focus. However, there has been a philosophical shift towards improving the collaboration between teams. And although both teams have vastly different roles and purposes, they both contribute to generating revenue by ensuring a seamless and satisfying customer experience.
Business-IT alignment is a strategy that uses IT as a metric to achieve business objectives and bridge the gap between the business and IT sides of your company. Misaligned teams may cause problems in your organization such as
- Underperformance
- Poor ROI on investments
- Poor support for customers
- Loss in efficiency
Business-IT alignment aims to fix these issues by integrating IT into your company’s culture. Thus, business needs and goals can be achieved proactively instead of reactively during the decision-making process.
What causes businesses to be misaligned?
It’s not easy to be in perfect alignment. Businesses tend to be misaligned due to three traps they may fall into:
Investing into tools without investing into training:
Technological developments sometimes look like they can be instant solutions to your most painful problems, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of investing into them before understanding their risks and rewards. No tool is a “magic bullet” that can instantly generate profit while solving your problems; no matter which tools you choose to purchase, it will require both your IT and business teams to be up to the challenge of learning a new tool and process during an adjustment period. Without a clear deployment strategy in place, new tools may harm instead of help your team.
Working for individual goals rather than an overarching business strategy:
Business strategy must be well defined to be effective. Often, businesses may find themselves in a situation where the business and IT sides of their organization are speaking completely different languages and using entirely different processes. Teams work to meet their KPIs using the most efficient processes for their own team. If one team doesn’t understand how their KPIs affect the other’s, communication falls apart and one team may have to backtrack to fix inefficiencies that the other can’t even see. Without a clear corporate plan, your technology will only support individual actions rather than overarching across the organization.
Doing things the easy way:
As an organization grows and priorities shift, IT strategy should change with it. Many executives fall into the trap of choosing to do things the same way as they have always done them, and leaving the company’s IT strategy as-is. However, outdated IT agendas can’t support their businesses, and can cause significant losses. Without strategic agility, your IT staff will always be working for what your organization used to be instead of what it is today.
How can you become aligned?
Although facilitating a cultural shift within an organization will be challenging, the benefits of Business-IT Alignment are well worth it. Some of these benefits include:
- Reduced spending on IT
- Improved collaboration between departments
- Better end user experience
- More clarity into the true cost of incidents
- Reduced time-to-market
- Technology that prioritizes business processes
- Ability to make the smartest business decisions in every area
When managing the shift to align your business to reap these benefits, it’s important to have a plan to ensure a smooth transition. Here are the 5 A’s to achieving alignment:
Assess
Assess and analyze the current conditions in your organization, as well as what problems you are currently facing. How is your business communicating? Are there ample opportunities for all sides of your business to share ideas and solutions? Which roles would best benefit from additional training as well as inter-department integration? A strategy you can use to survey the business side is to ask them about their job and challenges they are facing, and use your qualified IT team to evaluate how they can service those needs.
Announce
Clearly announce your goals, define KPIs, and standardize objectives. Make sure that you have an overarching business strategy in place to create a space where these are all defined. In particular, identifying KPIs shared between teams will encourage greater alignment. Additionally, ensure transparency between all departments. Executive decisions must be as clear as possible. To check if your teams have clarity, see if they agree with or understand a recent managerial decision. If they don’t, it may mean you need to reevaluate how decisions are made.
Ally
Building trust within the organization is another cornerstone of success. Communicate with your organization as an alliance, so that every employee can own their challenges. You are all working as a whole in order to achieve your business goals. Redefine roles and responsibilities as necessary by reexamining the current chain of command to see where integration can lead to efficiency. Invite employees to make suggestions on how they believe performance can be improved. Highlighting the shared benefits of improving collaboration can help inspire the commitment and effort necessary to enact lasting change.
Assign
Your IT team is part of your business transformation toolkit. Consider adding IT to each of your teams to transform them as well as explore new revenue streams, rather than only utilizing your IT team as a business support. Additionally, try assigning a BRM, or business relationship manager, to establish a roadmap of communication between teams. Creating a role that monitors and encourages cross-department interactions adds validity to your commitments to making ongoing collaborative efforts a reality.
Appreciate
Now that you’ve worked hard to realign your organization, don’t forget to appreciate all the effort you and your employees have put in! Use opportunities to conduct assessments to measure efficiency, and take the chance to share the metrics that help quantify the effects of changes in communication and collaboration between teams. Business-IT alignment is an ongoing process that doesn’t end with a few quick fixes, so it’s important to emphasize what has worked. You’ll all witness the transformation or your organization as it takes place, so don’t lose the momentum you’ve built up and recognize the achievements you’ve all made so far.