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When IT and business leaders seek different and often conflicting goals, the entire enterprise suffers. A strong alliance is essential to achieve long-term success.
Most IT and business executives recognize the necessity of close alignment. They understand that their strategies, capabilities, resources, and management systems should be configured to support the enterprise’s overarching purpose and goals.
But the challenge many executives face is that they tend to focus on how their particular area aligns with overall goals, to the exclusion of other facets of the organization. What really matters is determining how to fit every function together to achieve unified goals — chiefly IT and its business counterparts, given the importance technology has organizationwide.
Is your IT organization doing all it can to build strong alignment with business leaders and colleagues? Here are 11 effective ways to reach that goal.
1. Recognize IT and business are inseparable
IT and business strategies are now fully intertwined, observes Jay Upchurch, EVP and CIO at analytics vendor SAS. “There’s no good business strategy without an IT strategy supporting it, and there’s no good IT strategy that isn’t aligned to business strategy,” he says. “The best way to ensure alignment is to make IT leadership an active part of organizational leadership.”
Having a seat at the strategy table helps IT push the business forward. “It allows businesses to be the best technologically enabled version of themselves,” Upchurch says. It’s important for CIOs to advise on, acknowledge, understand, and deliver on the business plan to create an effective IT roadmap that aligns to the organization’s business strategy.
2. Know each function’s goals, challenges, and interests
To ensure alignment and long-term success, IT leaders must understand the unique challenges each of their business colleagues face, and how to find the most effective balance across the organization, says Bill Bragg, CIO at AI SaaS firm SymphonyAI. “Since there’s no universal model across business functions, IT must always keep in mind how they are leaders and partners of change in the corporation, whether it’s at a technical, business, or human change management level.”
A key way to facilitate alignment is to become agile enough to stay ahead of the curve, and be adaptive to change, Bragg advises. The CIO should also speak early when sensing a possible business course deviation. “A modern digital corporation requires IT to be a good partner in driving to the future rather than dwelling on a stable state.”
IT leaders also need to be agile enough to drive and support change, communicate effectively, and be transparent about current projects and initiatives. Equally important, Bragg adds, is “regular engagement with functional and product areas through avenues such as quarterly business reviews and forwarding-planning strategy sessions.”
3. Build close business relationships
Building close alignment between IT and business requires committing to earnest, insightful discussions. Imagine, for instance, a conversation about AI. A business leader may want to adopt AI, but might not understand that AI works best when fueled by large amounts of data. “By explaining the concepts behind AI in a clear manner, the business leader can be introduced to the building blocks for AI, and the IT leader can develop an acceptable strategy,” advises Nidal Haddad, principal at business advisory firm Deloitte Consulting.
To build strong ties, IT leaders must also listen to and learn from their business counterparts. “IT leaders can’t create a plan to enable business priorities in a vacuum,” Haddad explains. “It’s better to ask [business] leaders to share their plans, removing the guesswork around business needs and intentions.”
4. Ask the right questions
When meeting with business colleagues, it’s natural to zero in on questions relating to IT solutions, strategies, and operations. Yet these topics are often foreign to most business leaders. “It requires them to role-play your job, and they’re not very good at that because it’s never been their job,” explains Rob Collie, founder and CEO of consulting firm P3.
Collie believes it’s far more productive to ask business leaders about their own jobs, including their view of market trends and the key business challenges they’re facing. “It’s then our job on the IT side to evaluate where technology solutions could be brought online to service those needs,” he states. “That’s really the essence of the IT mission statement.”
5. Build trust
Successful relationships are built on mutual respect and shared goals. “Ensuring you have a deep understanding of your partners’ business, taking extreme ownership of challenges, and being vulnerable are all tenants of building tight partnerships,” observes Andrew Palmer, CIO for global retail markets at Liberty Mutual Insurance.
Failing to align IT and business interests gradually erodes hard-earned trust. “It fuels skepticism in technology strategies, promotes a culture of blame, reduces patience and forces planning into unproductive levels of detail resulting in a false sense of precision,” Palmer says. When business leaders have confidence in IT, everything moves faster. “Decision-making is crisper, risk-taking is increased and teams spend more time executing than planning.”
6. Beware silos — and be proactive about adding value
Business leaders are often concerned that IT may not be fully aligned with enterprise needs and challenges, observes Brian Bronson, EVP at IT services firm Capgemini Americas. “While alignment between these functions is now widely recognized as critical, this has not been the standard within most organizations until recent years,” he notes.
By taking a proactive stance, IT can better anticipate the needs of the business and contribute to long-term planning, Bronson says. “Contrary to the antiquated approach, wherein business stakeholders simply make an IT request and expect delivery, this approach establishes transparency, collaboration, and unified intentions to usher in the long-term benefits.”
7. Seek equal seating and set shared objectives
Collaboration between IT and business leaders is important, but it can be difficult for IT leaders to get a seat at the business strategy table, says Ola Chowning, a partner at technology research and advisory firm ISG. Likewise, it’s often challenging for business executives to get a seat at the IT strategy table.
The best way to ensure close alignment is to start at a high level, such as objectives and key results, and then drill down to a practical level, such as IT performance and response requirements, Chowning advises. “After setting the aligned, shared objectives, continually measure performance against those objectives and adjust objectives as business conditions change.”
8. Embrace metrics and data governance
David Curtis, CTO with fintech firm RobobAI, believes IT-business alignment can be effectively judged by evaluating strategic objectives and KPIs against actual outcomes. This includes collaboration, agility, stakeholder satisfaction, and the strategic impact of IT on business outcomes,” he explains. “Regular feedback and performance reviews involving both IT and business leadership are also critical for ongoing alignment.”
9. Communicate insights and opinions
The best way to guarantee close alignment between IT and business leaders is with regular, structured communication, says Lucas Botzen, CEO at employment services firm Rivermate. “This involves frequent strategy sessions in which both sides discuss goals, challenges, and opportunities,” he explains. “Such meetings align IT projects with larger business objectives, ensuing that technology investments are prioritized in support of long-term success.”
Additionally, Botzen recommends placing IT professionals within business units to help better understand their needs. “This works because it creates a more collaborative atmosphere where both IT and business leadership are speaking the same language,” he says. “Such integration allows technology to drive strategy, not operations, hence keeping businesses competitive and innovative.” Botzen adds that it also avoids misappropriation of resources by focusing resources on projects that yield the highest business value.
10. Become a motivator
Most business leaders expect IT to be the engine that propels enterprise success. “Only aiming to meet defined business needs is selling IT short,” says Aviv Ben-Yosef, an independent tech industry executive consultant and coach. “The best IT teams in the world bring forth their own innovation to solve business needs”
Understand that business leaders may not yet be aware of important new or enhanced technologies. It’s an IT leader’s responsibility, Ben-Yosef says, to alert business colleagues to disruptive and transformational technologies with the potential to change the entire business landscape, as well as lesser innovations that can lead to incremental market and performance enhancements.
11. Think like a business leader
Once you’ve committed to understanding the business, building a relationship and dialogue with business leaders becomes much easier and effective, says Rebecca Fox, group CIO at cybersecurity services provider NCC Group. Supporting and developing technology should never be reduced to guessing about the next steps the organization should take. “It should be about being part of the decision-making process, injecting yourself into the business strategy, direction, and issues, and to be ready with options and solutions.”
This article originally appeared in CIO Magazine. Read the source article here.
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