Business/IT alignment is a dead horse

Is business/IT alignment a topic in conversations on a social platform like Twitter. How much Buzz is there on business/IT alignment or  business/IT fusion. After all, this has been topping the charts of CIO priorities over the last decade or so. Most of the tweets referred to an article posted on www.searchCIO.com that discusses the importance of business/IT alignment in today's context of growth, cost reductions, enterprise productivity, need for innovation and IT effectiveness. Hardly conversation starters if you ask me. I do appreciate Gartner's view though on the role of the CIO when they say and I quote

"You (i.e. CIO) 're not the bottleneck. You're not the long tail. You're not the reason why they can't implement strategy," McDonald led the cheer. "You own the speed of execution because you can't touch anything without touching IT these days. As your companies look to go for growth outside of home markets, as you diversify products and services to address ever-fracturing markets, you are the means for scale."

The article also mentions the E square philosophy: Efficiency and effectiveness or as Gartner fellow McDonald puts it Productivity and Effeciency. Business/IT alignment resembles a lot to riding a dead horse story in a way... When your IT department lack the fundamental skills to deliver strategic initiatives on scope and on time, keep the lights running at all time, create a positive customer experience and pave to the way to enterprise growth... your IT department is the dead horse.

This is how the story begins....when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, we often try other strategies with a dead horse including: 

buying a stronger whip; changing riders; saying things like "this is the way we always have ridden this horse; or appointing a committee to study the horse; or arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses;or increasing the standards for riding dead horses;or appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse; read full story here.

In a business context, your enterprise and IT go together like a horse and carriage. That's why we call it enterprise IT... Now, if you have a dead horse in your organization and it is called IT, then why not attend IRM UK's forthcoming seminar on Successfully Aligning Business and IT. It's going to be a discovery journey in the wonderful world of technology, strategy and changing the culture in your IT shop. Targeted both at a business and IT audience, you will learn more about the alignment trap, intelligent governance, E square, Enterprise 2.0 and the marketing of IT. The seminar is on 25 and 26 November in the Hatton - I hope you will join us in the conversation on in London or tune in to twitter #BITA2010