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

The evolution of IT

For those who wonder what we actually do... this vid explains it all. How technology has evolved over the last half a century and how IT is now fundamentally reshaping the way we are doing business and running our organizations.

Grab a cup of coffee, push the play button and sit back, relax and enjoy!

Y fusion?

Many IT organizations deal with a serious skills shortage - the labor market is volatile, people come and go and valuable knowledge is lost as a result of retiring boomers.
Some of them also struggle with their image: they are not seen as companies that promise exciting career paths or steep promotion opportunities.
The IT shop of bank I used to consult for ran a survey on their image and attractiveness as a potential employer : the survey revealed that 70% did not even know that the bank had such a large IT organization (exceeding ten thousand IT workers). Second confronting point was that most respondents thought of an IT sweatshop in terms of bureaucratic, slow, risk averse, regulatory, no career opportunity. Image is everything... in your face right.

IT marketing - the mechanics for using marketing best practices in IT communication - will help in improving your image as an employer. If you succeed in understanding their values, what they stand for and care for, you can pimp your IT marketing with their language - using their vocabulary to become (emotionally) connected.
Connecting with Generation Y can create an enormous innovation potential for the firm: for these digital natives technology has become a second nature .
Unfortunately bureaucratic, process-oriented, regulatory and the like are not the most appealing set of values to catch the Gen Y's attention. These people are community beasts, love their bling bling tech gadgets, think in terms of global consciousness and connectedness and are in touch with mother nature. For them, job security reads job diversity, Long term career path is traded for short term flexibility and continued learning and job loyalty is being thought of in terms of months rather than years.

Creating a new habitat where these millenials feel comfy in will take time - it is matter of a culture change at all levels of the organization. Say bye to authority, rank or level and hi to community, power groups and work-life balance.

I am convinced that we can make IT a sexy career alternative, if we are prepared to rethink our organizational models and underlying philosophy. We will have to adapt our corporate ecosystem to cater for this new breed of knowledge workers - no more caging in cubicles but giving the possibility of creating, exploring new spaced and interconnected thinking (don't know what it means but it sounds nice, doesn't it). The next gen workforce will only feel happy @ work, if it is close to their personal habitat.

If you dare to rock and roll your culture, then you can start jamming with these new kids on the block... Combine it with a right-brain recruitment campaign and you have all the necessary ingredients for a Y fusion