The Execution Challenge

Preface

My over 20-year journey with strategy execution evolved as I moved into strategy-oriented IT leadership roles and, more recently, through my ongoing research and work with enterprise and business architecture groups and strategic planning groups in a variety of organizations and industries. I started this journey with the indoctrination that direct alignment between business and IT strategy was the “holy grail,” but I also saw that this alignment was not happening in most organizations and I began to explore why this was the case. At the same time, I ran across a quote from Michael Porter stating that 80 percent of organizations fail to execute their business strategy, which was consistent with my experience. I also saw that in many of these organizations, the failure of IT to align with business strategy was often blamed as a primary cause of this failure to execute strategy. I asked myself if this was the real root cause of the strategy execution problems or something more. My conclusions offer a pragmatic and proven approach to strategy execution and alignment that challenges some of the traditional literature and thinking.

In short, direct alignment between IT and business strategies is not possible for reasons we will discuss in detail in this book. An interim “Rosetta stone” alignment mechanism is needed for effective and sustainable alignment over time—this interim mechanism is the core business capabilities of the organization. We will discuss in detail how ...