Leading the way

Clearly, achieving alignment is a long-term process, but it's one that requires a deeper IT/business relationship. What's the best way to engage IT with these business goals?

Chiappetta: Clear communication, financial modeling. And you need to have a solid business strategy that's well communicated: Without it, IT has no chance.

Griffin: C-level executives need to understand that technology is an integral part of business and elevate IT to equal footing with finance or manufacturing. IT needs to be recognized as a full strategic partner—not as an order-taker. But IT also needs to stop taking orders, to start asking for collaboration and begin asserting opinions. IT needs to have interest in the business, to be a more natural part of the fiber of the business, and to demonstrate and communicate its own understanding of the business and business processes.

Willoch: Teach your IT architects to think like business consultants. It's easier to teach (business to) IT and embed the architects in business than it is to teach an MBA about IT architecture.

Who must take the lead in the alignment process? Do CEOs have a required large leadership role here? Do they need to be actively engaged/involved in the process or can they lead alignment from a distance?

Chiappetta: The CEO does not need to be actively involved. The role of the CEO in an alignment is to create a vision that IT and business leaders can rally around. IT needs to take the lead in selling value. Business needs to take the lead in expressing the value that can be created.

Quiring: My observation is that CEOs don't have to do any of this, as long as the expectations and directions they set are completely clear. In terms of alignment, the CIO's role is critical—the CIO has to instill a certain duality in IT culture. Like light—which can be a wave or a particle, and switch back and forth at its own caprice—IT has to be able to envision what's possible at any time and place, and at the same time IT leaders have to be absolute realists, making pragmatic recommendations of specific things that can be accomplished for reasonable money in reasonable time and supported into the future.

Rheiner: It has to start at senior level, the CEO's office and his direct reports, and you have to have a CEO who understands that technology can make an impact on business, and understands the importance of investing in IT. You need to get the CIO, COO, sales, marketing and development all aligned as a team, asking if the IT organization's goals are aligned to the rest of the corporation's goals. Then you begin to align and retrain the IT organization—to put IT into (the) business community.

Robertson: Yes. Business and IT must work together and have a "burning platform" to change. The CEO is in the best position to make that happen. Without it, it's going to be extremely difficult to change.

Willoch: There are two ways to approach transformational exercise. (One is) top-down, with the entire management team rolling out the transformation into the organization. This approach usually stops at a fairly high level. But if you spend the time and energy to mobilize the front-line masses of the organization toward the same objectives, and both sides meet in the middle, you create a pincer movement that crushes the permafrost you encounter there.

Because alignment transforms traditional roles and relationships within an organization, what change-management practices should be in place as the alignment proceeds?

Chiappetta: Alignment is about putting more power in the hands of the business users. So some of the controls that IT traditionally had in place need to be replicated at the business user side, with the paradigm of changing business policy. IT is typically the best organization in the company for implementing new business policies in a controlled, well-managed, documented way. As business picks up the tasks, they need to replicate IT's findings.

Griffin: Companies must be committed to getting out the alignment message in many different ways—Webcasts, education sessions, lunch-and-learns, working groups, councils and steering committees, and Web sites. And the communication plan must support these.

Quiring: Change management around alignment should really be short and sweet. You shouldn't have to create a whole set of new organizational entities and bodies—the theme should be "lite," using and re-purposing existing organizations and governance processes. That's not always possible—sometimes you have to dynamite and re-pour.

Rheiner: Companies absolutely have to embrace change management, to redefine roles and redefine the clarity of roles and responsibilities, to be able to train and retrain people. And you're often dealing with two organizations that have different communication and learning styles. You need to recognize this and adapt your approach to overcoming the differences.

Robertson: I highly recommend that you look at any change from an individual level as well as from an organizational change perspective. Assess your key stakeholders, their readiness for and ability to change, their skill sets, your organizational processes and structure and the performance measurements to monitor new processes.

Rodwick: You absolutely need change management practices and tools, particularly communications capabilities. If you believe one of the values of alignment is the ability to move more nimbly, I suggest that you're going to be changing more frequently rather than less frequently.

Willoch: You must absolutely have approaches that address change management. But an approach is one thing; an accomplishment is something else. If you're doing change management on top of an unaligned business model, the process will end badly and you won't be able to deliver.

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