CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology

Chapter 2. Architecture, Portfolio Management, Organizational Development—Integrated Foundations for Strategy Realization

—BY ANTHONY HILL

It is the goal of every good CIO to align IT strategy to business strategy. No rational businessperson today would argue this premise. However, this simple premise is harder to achieve than is readily apparent. What IT needs to build and deliver to achieve the goals of business strategy can be difficult to identify, and highly debatable depending on one's point of view within the enterprise. IT systems can be abstract, complex, and difficult to understand. Business processes, enabled by systems, can suffer from the same challenge. An enterprise will have a collection of systems created by different people at different times under different sets of information, constraints, and decisions. Parochial interests of different business units, departments, and key managers can also confound the issue. It is no wonder that an organization can sometimes feel that its IT systems, processes, and people are not in synch with its current strategy and goals.

The CIO, IT staff, and other business leaders and staff need to be able to see and understand alignment between IT and business strategy. They need to be able to understand the elements that create alignment and understand their relationship and contribution to those elements. And, based on this understanding, they need to become the champions of the correct behaviors and processes that lead an organization ...