IT Business

Why Is IT And Business Alignment So Elusive?

Today’s pace of business demands that IT move quickly to address business needs – which has a prerequisite of IT getting very tight alignment to what the business needs and doing that work in the right order. It seems basic. But IT has a bit of a history of focusing solely on IT performance – cost, quality and speed – and being a little light on clear business outcome metrics. With these measures, IT ends up driving toward standard solutions in the name of efficiency but forgets to measure business effectiveness. Here is why this happens.

The Shift To Efficiency Created Problems

If we look back at the history of technical solutions deployed in business IT, we see wave after wave of attempts to bridge the business/technology chasm. In the 1980s, we saw the emergence of case tools (if you are too young to remember, look it up). Case tools were supposed to be the ultimate in connecting business process and data to application development. Once you had the business defined right, then COBOL code was automatically generated. You would never write a line of code again.

Then we had object-oriented development, then services-oriented architecture, then micro services and many others too numerous to mention. While there was nothing intrinsically wrong with these approaches if you started with the business process first, companies never became good at starting with the business process first.

In those few companies that were successful in deploying these approaches, one often found a business-oriented IT group and an IT savvy business group working together. Humans, not methodology, were the bridge between business need and technical solution. Sadly, that entente seldom lasted past the coming of the next new fad in IT.   

In the turmoil of transition to a new methodology, the focus on business effectiveness often got lost. When a company loses the connection to business impact, the only opportunity for IT is cost. And if cost is the only concern, then standardization and centralization are very attractive.