Have you asked your CIO lately whether he thinks IT at your firm is "aligned" with your business?
Are you wondering what on earth I’m talking about?
If you haven’t immersed yourself in IT management literature (I have), I need to explain that "alignment" between the IT department and the strategic objectives and actual functions of the firm is the Holy Grail: Without "alignment," IT is off in outer space, dealing with whatever it’s dealing with (and sending you the whopping bill for it), but leaving you and your partners without a clue as to what it’s accomplishing. All you know (again, absent "alignment") is that if email is down for two minutes or the network seems sluggish or the brilliant draft of the brief you finished last night seems to have utterly vanished, holy hell will break loose. But expect the IT department to actually help you work smarter? Please.
This is where alignment comes in.
What is this slippery creature? According to CIO Magazine’s 2007 State of the CIO report, it is "less technical than it is social," and
How well an organization has aligned IT processes with the business strategy depends on "how well the CIO is communicating with C-level colleagues," says Laurie Orlov, vice president and director of research for Forrester. "They need to be able to fully communicate what IT is doing and why that is important to the business strategy."
This is where alignment "brings the money," as CIO puts it, recapping their annual survey. These (self-reported) scores represent "aligned" vs. admittedly un-aligned CIO’s:
- 24% of aligned CIO’s reported enabling new revenue, vs. 11% of un-aligned;
- 38% vs. 23% in creating competitive advantage;
- 45% vs. 30% in enhancing competitiveness next year;
- yet only one out of five identifies themselves as aligned, and a depressing 80% consider themselves not.
The coin of the realm, as in all matters involving cross-departmental trust, is simple human trust and communication. CIO sums it up by recounting the experience of a CIO at a privately held publisher who has a simple policy: At least once a week, he makes a point of meeting a business department leader out of the office—lunch, drinks, a round of golf—and does a sanity check of how IT-related projects are going. As he puts it, this turns potentially threatening exercises in dueling accusations into opportunities to "look for solutions rather than assign blame."
CIO underlines the point: "And when you get down to it, blame is what a lack of alignment is all about. It is resentment that a service paid for does not deliver more business."
In a companion piece, CIO elaborates on how IT leaders that work across the divide between "pinstripes and process" spend more time with their fellow CXO’s, less time putting out IT crises, and are more likely to have been economics majors or have MBA’s. They don’t talk about "IT projects," they talk about "business initiatives."
That’s not to say that being a business partner means being a business "pushover"—and taking on more than their resources can tackle. Being smart about what drives the business also entails establishing priorities. The CIO at a firm with a few dozen lawyers can’t match Skadden; pick your battles.
Is much of this obvious? Perhaps—unless you’d never thought about it.
In the 21st Century, the competitive landscape will increasingly be shaped by IT. You need to have the right CIO on-board, and I’m writing this to remind you of that imperative. Indeed, someone recently asked me if I thought the CFO or the CIO had the better overall "grasp" of what a firm’s about. And in my heart I knew a sea change had occurred. I responded:
"Ten or twenty years ago, the CFO without a doubt. Today, and as far ahead as the eye can see, the CIO."
