IT organizations are under increasing pressure to align investments and operations expenses with the needs of the business, and in many cases this has become a reality. But the results are frequently disappointing. So what comes next?

I believe that the goal of IT & Business alignment is to ensure that all IT investments and operations activities are oriented towards creating and maximizing value-added products and services for the end customer. The IT organization should have a process driven focus on the systemic identification, reduction and where possible elimination of non-value add processes and activities.

In most businesses the IT organization predominantly serves internal customers who act as proxies for the end customer. One of the challenges with this approach is that it assumes that the business correctly understands the stated and unstated goals and desires of customers and is able to translate them with high-fidelity to the IT organization for action. Similarly it assumes that the IT organization can correctly hear and determine the goals of the customer as echoed by the sales/marketing/product management organization.

I have seen many examples where this is not the case. The end result is an investment or process change that is implemented on-time, on-budget and with good quality that misses the mark in the eye’s of the customer. When these situations occur it’s useful to identify if anyone from the IT organization actually spent time face to face with the customer to determine their goals, priorities and motivations. Frequently, this did not happen.

Today’s IT Strategy

Today, many IT strategies are striving to implement Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based technical strategies, but these efforts run the risk of delivering sub-optimal business results due to a lack of strategic alignment with the customer.

While SOA and BPM provide ways to reduce development and maintenance costs, reduce time to implement changes and enable new features and functions, the benefits will not be realized if the IT strategy does not accurately take into account the current and future goals and aspirations of end customers. There are important strategic considerations that are being decided within the IT organization on prioritizing and selecting and scheduling these investments and unless there is a planned customer orientation it’s very likely that the investment won’t translate into the desired customer benefits.

If you are planning to implement SOA or BPM or already have these investments well under way, but are concerned about the lack of end results to the business, The Pennell Group can help. We will assess the current status of your IT strategy and deliver creative, value added solutions that maximize the impact of these investments.

The Pennell Group will take you from here:

IT Business Alignment -> SOA & BPM -> XXX MIXED RESULT XXX

To Here:

Strategic Customer Alignment -> SOA & BPM -> BUSINESS SUCCESS!!!