Why You Should Align Your Business and IT Strategies
The Challenge
When significant change occurs in a business, more commonly, the business leaders also update their company strategy to face up the the change and for non-tech focused businesses, the tendency is also usually to focus last, if at all, on the technology that may underpin those changes.
The next common tendency is for the subsequent changes to technology or systems to get squeezed into ‘cost centres’ and IT Managers simply asked to ‘make things (miracles really) happen’.
With technology innovation as pervasive as it is in every area of our lives today, every business area will have its own technology demands and the tendency for IT budgets to expand into monstrous proportions as a result of this will not be lost very soon.
The Reaction
The most typical reaction to this in many businesses then becomes one of ‘cost management’. Questions are asked about where concessions could be made and decisions are taken based on the implication to the business of the higher costs and challenges of updating existing technologies compared to the costs of maintaining legacy systems and applications.
In businesses where technology leaders are excluded from strategic planning sessions, the impact of any strategic business changes onto the in-house technology and IT teams becomes one that easily elicits a reactionary approach in terms of delivery.
The Impact
This approach tends to serve mainly the interests of the individual (requesting) department in the business without necessarily catering towards the ultimate business goals.
In a situation where the Technology and IT leaders are not engaged in the new business strategy early on, what businesses soon find is that the in-house tech- and IT team(s) become to a large extent hamstrung, with little or no insight into what’s happening in each area of the business.
This is a particularly difficult place for IT leaders to be able to make the best technology decisions that would support the overarching business strategy.
The result of this is a business that evolves its core strategy whilst the technology team works to an old strategy, or even worse, a divergent one. And thus begins a classic case of organisational misalignment. This is a living nightmare for any business and its usually most hard-working people.
The Case For Change
Identifying and correcting organisational misalignment is critical to any business. The benefits of integrating business and IT strategies for businesses to gain a competitive edge in this day and age cannot be underestimated.
Some may argue for and against the need for Tech and IT leaders to have a seat at the executive table where the course for the business is charted to avoid falling into this trap but we’ll save that debate for another day.
It’s far more important for businesses to recognise the need to foster a comprehensive understanding at all levels of business leadership, the benefits of working in tandem with Tech and IT leaders in the direction and delivery of any effective business strategy.
Ensuring such a delicate balance would deliver such critical returns to business as:
- Empowering Tech and IT leaders to frequently review Business IT Strategy against Business Strategy, keeping their finger on the pulse of how technology may be supporting (or abetting) the business growth and making necessary changes.
- Focusing the efforts of in-house Tech and IT teams on only those services that drive the business towards the success of its goals.
- Enabling Executive Teams to plan and budget appropriately for the right technology to drive the business towards achieving its ultimate goals.
With technology being in such a unique position to deliver far-reaching and impacting change across multiple areas of business, the focus on technology and IT needs to be adopted very early on and closely embedded within any business philosophy to enable progressive businesses stay ahead of their competition.