Everybody Loves IT

If you’ve ever watched Everybody Loves Raymond, you know that the title star (Ray Romano) is a character that everyone loves…to lean on and dictate to. After reading an excellent set of blogs by Jason Hiner, Tech Republic Executive Editor entitled Sanity check: If you’re working on IT-business alignment, you’ve already lost and Sanity check: IT-business alignment, part 2 — avoiding the alignment trap I came away with a similar reaction when considering the current relationship between IT and the non-IT ‘business’.

(Picture Credit: Geek and Poke)

There’s plenty of ‘love’ these days being expressed for IT from this vast entity referred to as ‘the business’. Continually one hears how IT is the new partner with the business side of the house, how IT is being ‘empowered’ to deliver service, how IT is to be aligned with business… ITIL® v3 (Service Management Practices) has even expanded its focus to stress a service management lifecycle where creating business value takes precedence over the execution of IT processes.

I have to agree with Jason Hiner that all this talk about IT being aligned with the business really indicates that there is very little real alignment happening. Mind you, many organizations with whom we speak express a willingness to align IT and business. Many indicate that they are pursuing ITIL and/or are adopting similar areas of guidance to make IT and business work together, and there are success stories of forward-thinking CxOs that are tackling this problem head-on.

From our corner of the industry, change and release management is an area where a greater alignment between the business and IT is sorely needed. IT today largely struggles with the technical challenges of change and release management. This includes managing the impact of change to extremely complex and interdependent systems, while lacking adequate staging environments or mature test and analysis tools. IT’s business counterparts increase this challenge by demanding extremely high system availability while attempting to introduce a large number and diversity of changes to the production infrastructure.

The CEO must help senior IT executives establish the value of IT integration in a non-threatening way. Just as IT is held accountable to deliver business services, hold non-IT executives accountable for helping IT expand their role as a business partner. This is a matter of tone as much as it is actual process.

I have to take exception to the call-out in Jason’s first blog that stated “The glass wall between IT and the rest of a company has to be shattered”. A CEO that goes about exhorting the need to shatter IT’s glass wall can create a perception of upheaval and uncertainty. Will executives lose control of their business units? Will scarce resources be re-directed to not just shatter this wall but also possibly clean up a big mess? Don’t set out to shatter, set out to build a working partnership.

Don’t expect IT to shatter or otherwise eliminate the glass wall on their own. Jason’s blog referred to the Wall Street Journal’s “How To Tap IT’s Hidden Potential”, which listed the all-too-common mandate for CIOs to “fully integrate IT into the company”. Is this a partnership or not? IT empowerment is a fine concept, but IT is only empowered when business counterparts understand and share responsibility in their mission. Non-IT executives need to spend time following requests into and through the glass house to fully understand how to align with IT.

Don’t worry; you won’t get computer grease on your white shirts. Instead you’ll gain an appreciation for how IT must respond to everyone’s initiatives, not just yours. This concept of empowering IT to address the needs of the business over the line-of-businesses will go a long way to removing the barriers to IT/business alignment.

In his follow-on blog, Jason recommended the very interesting study Avoiding the Alignment Trap in Information Technology from the MIT Sloan Management Review. This study stated that “Companies cannot build effectiveness unless they hold IT and the business accountable for delivering expected results on time and on budget.”, and contained a survey of business and IT leaders in which only 25% of respondents believed IT capability to highly aligned and highly effective.

However, the study also drew an encouraging conclusion. It pointed to multiple examples of organizations, just like yours, in which “the best performers tightly align their entire IT organization to the strategic objectives of the overall business, using governance principles that cross organizational lines and making business executives responsible for key IT initiatives.”

Read and enjoy.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Filed Under: IT Operations, ITIL