Alignment defined

How do you define alignment?

Chiappetta: There's not just one definition. Alignment involves business and IT coming closer together, but it also requires enterprise-level decisioning across channels and across business units, as well as a third constituency beyond business and IT: the technical analysts who work with data on a day-to-day basis. You've got to get all three aligned.

Griffin: Alignment is the synchronization of IT applications and activities with the goals, objectives, and strategies of business. At its best, alignment results in IT constantly asking, "What business problem are we trying to solve? Who is our business sponsorship?"

Quiring: I look at three barometers. Strategic alignment: whether or not IT direction is the same as business direction from a long-range perspective. Investment alignment: On a fiscal year-by-year basis, are investments positioned in ways that support business capabilities and in ways that support business strategies? Alignment with priorities: Both annual and quarterly priorities must be addressed to ensure that investments and priorities aligned for the fiscal year are matched by people in the trenches.

Rheiner: It all boils down to IT partners understanding the business and its goals, being aligned at the corporate level. Every day when IT wakes up you want them to think about and be goaled and aligned to the exact same things the business is held accountable for.

Robertson: There's not one consistent definition-it depends on the role of IT within the company, the maturity of the business as well as—the maturity of the company's IT function. However, one consistent element is that IT is completely supporting and/or driving business goals versus its own IT-centric goals.

Is alignment the same for every industry?

Quiring: The definition doesn't vary by industry, but by other factors. Differences are more characteristic of factors like the size of the company. A small financial services firm and a small retailer will have more similar alignment characteristics than a small retailer and a larger retailer. How companies structure and organize themselves, how they measure overall financial performance and dole out the proceeds of that financial performance have more to do with what alignment means, and the goals of alignment, than the type of industry.

Rheiner: I don't really think there are fundamental differences by industry, but there are some industries that tend to embrace technology faster or industries that are fast-moving that morph frequently.

Rodwick: Certain industries and certain business models—B2B, B2C—carry some subtle differences. It can be affected by the number of customers (millions versus dozens, depending on the business), whether or not the distribution channel to the customers is direct or indirect.

Willoch: Transaction-intensive organizations—banks, telcos—need a 360-degree view of customers in order to create attractive propositions for all aspects of the customer's relationship. This is becoming more and more necessary in order to maintain customer relations, but it's really, really hard to do. It's one of the things that some organizations try to do with data mining engines on top of messy plumbing. Many organizations are standing at a watershed. They've done a few levels of standardization here and there, but service-oriented architectures and agent-based technologies can really enable change in flexibility and adaptiveness. Organizations that want to be bold and ahead of the curve can do things now with re-architecting that will put them in an advantageous position.

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