IT and Business Alignment Begins with Listening

By Robert Stone, Managing Consultant

A lot has been written about the topic of IT –business alignment. We see it in action at our clients all the time. Baseline even offers a course on the topic.  I’ve made certain observations about it in my client work over the years that I’d like to share in this blog post.

We find that business intelligence projects are often the optimum way for companies to achieve tighter IT-business alignment. That’s because IT - business alignment will succeed only if you’re solving a business problem.  IT should not show up at a meeting with business users and recite a laundry list of everything they can do.  They should also avoid discussions of technology or existing reports. Instead, they should ask the business what their problems are.  Stakeholders actually enjoy describing what is preventing them from achieving their strategic goals or, at an individual level, what is preventing them from being more productive in their daily work.  IT should listen to the concerns of the business stakeholders and then determine how they can help in an effective manner.   Successful projects will become more frequent because IT already knows the business problems in detail before the project ever begins.

photo by Orange_Beard

Alignment is really all about building a relationship of trust.  If you constantly help business find reasonable and effective solutions then they will trust you.  Trust is also doing what you say—much easier with a set of articulated business requirements in place—and this requires good data management and business intelligence capabilities.

Alignment is not about pitching the business on a new project, the latest BI tool, or the latest methodology. It’s about establishing rules of engagement that can only be followed after earning the stakeholders’ trust.

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Robert Stone has been with Baseline Consulting over 9 years and is a Managing Consultant responsible for leading and managing large and small projects.  He has over 25 years of IT experience with a diverse knowledge and skill base, and he's focused his skills on using technology to empower business users in many industries.

Comments

[Paul Erb]

Did an IT/Business alignment effort at a matrixed, big financial services company. After all the maturity models, we settled on one word: "colocation." IT has to learn the language of the business, to admit we are immigrants in that respect--enriching the home culture, and valued guests...but guests.

[Joe Baird]

Robert -
Nice article!

I'm betting that - with the right tools and the right data architecture reducing the role of the pure technician - in a few years you'll be able to write on the coalescing of IT and Business (and alignment of separated assignments will disappear).