IT Alignment Failure Factor - from Cutter Consortium article

An article from the Cutter Consortium by Bob Benson and Tom Bugnitz entitled "Engaging Business Management" outlines a failure factor they have observed in organizations attempting to align IT with business. This failure factor is summarized in the following quote from the article: " We continue to confront a basic problem in IT management: business managers aren't much intrested in participating in prioritization alignment, and planning exercises for IT.... While the corporate CFO, and possibly the CEO do worry about IT costs, individual business unit managers who consume IT services simply aren't interested."

The authors attribute this lack of interest to the fact that, "IT costs represent only 2%-5% of the total company budget." Their recommendation is to:

"1. Get the IT cost comparisons right
2. Focus on making IT cost decisions"

Unlike these authors, we have not had difficulty in engaging the business unit managers in alignment exercises unless IT's credibility is below the critical threshold (see CogniTech's website at http://www.cognitechcorp.com for more on IT Credibility). We find business managers are willing to engage with IT in alignment work when the meeting is focused on identifying the capabilities and projects IT can bring to the business manager's goal accomplishment. Business managers are eager to find out what IT can bring to the table to enable them to successfully complete their goals. They are less interested in meeting with IT to prioritize a list of IT projects - regardless of where the list originated. Meetings in which IT projects are jointly identified by business managers and IT managers do not require additional prioritization meetings since the goal priority establishes IT project priority.

While I agree with the authors that it is important that the IT cost metrics and cost decisions are right -- the importance of IT to the organization resides more in IT's ability to leverage every function of the organization and the organization as a whole to perform better and to achieve its goals. The measure for this leverage is found in a measure of IT Contribution rather than cost. (See Gartner publication "Realizing the Benefits of Project and Portfolio Management", Matt Light, Bill Rosser, Simon Hayward, January 2005 - and CogniTech publications on our website http://www.cognitechcorp.com).