Service Orient or Be Doomed!: How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business

CHAPTER 3

What Really Happened to eBusiness

Before we go any further, let's put to bed any discussion of that common consulting-speak cliché, business-IT alignment. Speak to consultants about spending money on IT, and they talk about business-IT alignment. Ask chief information officers what they're trying to accomplish, and they might include the term business-IT alignment in their strategy discussion. Business-IT alignment supposedly describes the goal of any IT initiative as bringing the capabilities of IT into alignment with business requirements. In a very real sense, then, this book is actually about business-IT alignment. So, if that's the case, why are we so eager to bury the term?

The problem with using the business-IT alignment term is that alignment simply means bringing different sections of the business together to accomplish some goal. The problems of aligning IT and business are as old at IT itself, and we never seem to make much progress in aligning anything, since corporate inflexibility and resistance to change impedes even the very act of attempting alignment. The elixir of promised agility through business-IT alignment continues to intoxicate businesses, however, when it's time for one more consultant's tired presentation on why some company should spend countless more bazillions of dollars on IT.

Now, don't get us wrong—although alignment may be a tired and empty term, there's no question that there has been dramatic progress in IT in the past 50 years and ...