CSD in Business / IT Alignment
Saturday, September 29th, 2007A CHALLENGE OF MOVING TARGETS
Business / IT Alignment is fundamentally a challenge of moving targets: technical innovation and business change. Accordingly, better Business / IT Alignment depends primarily on more/better/faster on-going planning between business and IT.
The core challenge in Business / IT Alignment is that this planning must focus on business/technology processes, ranging from division-wide operations models to detailed training and implementation plans.
Because of this, the primary bottleneck activity in Business / IT Alignment is collaborative solutions development. And The bottleneck resource in this activity is “collaborative solutions development capability”. That is, the ability to lead, contribute to and participate in group process knowledge sharing, design, implementation planning and consensus-building.
There is no substitute for these human activities, capabilities and results: where this capability is lacking, Business / IT Alignment falters.
A Major Bottleneck in IT Value Delivery
The focus of collaborative solutions development is bridging the gap between separate knowledge and interests and agreed upon activities, models and plans.
|
Separate knowledge and interests |
=> X <= |
Stakeholder alignment on detailed processes and plans |
This is a major bottleneck in innovation and IT in general.
The main symptom of this bottleneck is long cycles of meetings and communications in which information and consensus are gradually and often painfully and incompletely assembled.
The overall impact of this bottleneck is billions of dollars a year in cost, risk, error and delay in IT projects, along with matching frustration, conflict and stress, stalled innovation and progress, and lost opportunity.
And, failed Business / IT Alignment.
An Opportunity for the Seriously Ambitious
The challenge here is four part:
1) “collaborative solutions development” is such a widely used activity that it lacks a focus for improving its performance.
2) there are no highly effective, widely distributed solutions for supporting collaborative solutions development. (”What is the name of the market leader?”)
3) The capabilities of particularly talented individuals or high performance teams are generally not highly transportable, flexible or scalable.
4) Market attention is diffused and distracted by a myriad of solutions in the categories of collaboration, decision-support, process modeling and project planning that only partly address the above gap without significantly shortening the long cycles of meetings and communications.
The Need for a New Solutions Category
In my weblog article at http://blog.actionmap.com/, I make the case that “collaborative sooutions development” needs to be a new product and service category. That’s what it’s going to take to focus attention on the need for better tools for collaborative solutions development.
The Action Point
Why is Business / IT Aligment so difficult? Because it is largely a matter of matter of hard work. However, if it’s truly important, it’s time to identify and bear down on the right work.
My assertion is that the best action point for improved Business/IT Alignment is increasing collaborative solutions development capability.
In my weblog article I describe why this is a matter of strategic competitive importance and offer starting points for accomplishing it.
A Scorecard for Readiness
One of these starting points is a scorecard for evaluating your organization’s (and your personal) readiness to increase capability for collaborative solutions development. The scorecard is located at: http://www.actionmap.com/050_ScoreSumm.html.
Conclusion
Business / IT Alignment is primarily a challenge of moving targets, that involve business/technology processes.
The only way to keep up with this work is more/better/faster collaborative planning.
The critical constraining resource for this work is collaborative solutions development capability.
The market currently has no highly effective, widely used solution to support this capability.
Organizations that want to increase Business/IT Alignment need to demand and/or build better solutions for this capability.
The starting point is to get clear about the strategic importance of collaborative solutions development. The case for this is made at http://blog.actionmap.com/cpd_ovr/cpd_strategic/.
A scorecard for your organization’s readiness to do this work is available at http://www.actionmap.com/050_ScoreSumm.html.
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