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It appears that even if we do know the true value that IT delivers to businesses, most of us aren’t doing a good job of explaining it to business people. Our ongoing research into the challenges faced by CIOs and other senior IT and business decision makers strongly suggests that lack of trust in IT’s capabilities is one of the biggest hurdles faced in the transition of an IT organization to a situation where IT and business are truly aligned. This lack of trust, more often than not, lies at least in part in the fact that business representatives rarely have access to information or tools that would help them understand the actual contribution that IT makes to their business activities.
The resulting communication gap is crucial, because IT-business alignment isn’t only of academic interest. Business activity and IT are intimately intertwined, and as a result a high-quality IT capability can boost business effectiveness; while a poor-quality capability can severely restrict business’ ability to move as the market demands and to anticipate change.
The future is open – but our past is weighing us down…
It’s often supposed by business people that the gradual “opening up” of IT – from an environment dominated by proprietary mainframe data centers accessible from green screens towards one dominated by a globe-spanning network of interoperable information services which are accessible from the desktop and mobile devices – means that it now must be easier to establish clear relationships between IT investments, and the business tasks and processes that depend on them.
But the truth, of course, is that despite the best of intentions, old technologies in operation have not been displaced by new ones – newer technologies have just been added to the mix. Although future investments might make these relationships easier to determine and maintain, the legacy of past and current investments cannot be ignored.
The important thing to realize is that the state we’re in is more a result of poor business-IT communication than it is a result of poor technology usage (although the former does lead to the latter). Today IT might be closely interwoven with the cut-and-thrust of business activities and processes, but IT and business organizations are rarely well-aligned. Although newer technologies are more open and bring the potential to clarify technology-business relationships, in many organizations, the relationships between IT investments and business processes and practices are actually quite poorly understood within the business community.
Where there is little understanding of the value that IT provides to business, that means little trust in IT’s capabilities from the business side. And that’s a poor platform on which to build an IT capability which is truly aligned with business needs.
…and although the future is open, it’s also complex
Against this challenging background, it’s also clear that in trying to build bridges between IT and business communities and so demonstrate better business value from IT investments, IT organizations are working in an IT investment landscape which has changed shape significantly from that of the 1980s and 1990s. As figure 1 shows, although technology today is more open and flexible, the overall landscape has become a good deal more complex.
As a result the scope of IT concerns has also broadened. To deliver real business value from IT, organizations aren’t only concerned about whether Project X will be delivered on time; they’re worried about on-time project delivery as well as the overall efficiency of the business organization and the broad industry value chain in which it resides.
At the same time, trends in outsourcing and offshoring, as well as major transitions in how IT is architected and delivered, are increasing the distribution and complexity of software and human resources; and furthermore, they’re also increasing the complexity, number and opacity of the interdependencies between installed systems and technologies.
Now many IT organizations are suffering major pain as they try to deal with the combination of a steady accretion of technology over the past 40 years, and the pressure to connect people, information and processes together in more flexible ways.
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