Business and IT Alignment: The Rate of Change
Information Technology is continuing to challenge the way companies organize their business processes, communicate with customers and potential customers, and deliver their services. Although there is no single dominant re-organization strategy, common company structures all lean towards decentralizing IT, shifting it closer to end-users and melding the knowledge-base to business strategy for improved collaboration. Business and IT alignment is vital for market impact and growth.
This tactic means as business goals pivot, IT can more readily respond with necessary solutions to support and maintain enterprise momentum. In turn, technological advances and improvements are hardwired into current and future strategies and initiatives. As working ecosystems replace strict organizational structures, the traditional question “Which department do you work in?” has been replaced by “How do you work?”
Business and IT Alignment: Strategy
This continuous improvement and strategic loop means enterprises function better, make more profit, and see better ROI because they hit their goals with less effort. And while there may be no standard way to align successfully, an organization where IT and business strategy are in lock-step can improve agility and operational efficiencies. For example:
- Efficiency: Streamlined processes lead to faster execution and reduced cycle times. When business and IT work together seamlessly, tasks are completed more efficiently.
- Accuracy: Standardized processes minimize errors. Clear guidelines ensure consistent execution, reducing the risk of mistakes.
- Visibility: Alignment provides a shared understanding of end-to-end processes. Everyone involved knows their roles and responsibilities, enhancing collaboration.
- Agility: With well-aligned business and IT processes, organizations can adapt quickly to changing requirements.
That’s why companies are modernizing their approach to business process transformation with solutions to change faster by operationalizing a collaborative business process transformation strategy. The goal is to understand, proactively improve, and continuously transform processes efficiently to become a more resilient and sustainable business.
In fact, such is the importance of this continuous improvement synergy, successful companies are those that dive deeper. Amazon and Apple are prime examples—of course technology is integrated and aligned within their operational structure. In several cases, they created the integral technology and business strategies themselves!
Download now: Make continuous process transformation a core business competency.
Business and IT Alignment: Convergence and Integration
These type of aligned companies have increased the efficiency of technology investments and significantly reduced the financial and operational risks associated with business and technical change.
However, if this rate of change and business flux is as fast as we continually say, we need to be talking about convergence and integration, not just alignment. In other words, let’s do the research and learn, but empower next level thinking so we can focus on the co-creation of “true value” and respond quicker to customers, suppliers and users.
Without this granular strategy, companies may spend too much on technology without ever solving the business challenges they face due to different departmental objectives, cultures, and incentives. Simply put, business and IT alignment integrates technology with the strategy, mission, and goals of an organization, helping companies realize innovation and growth through continuous improvement.
This way, regardless of the changes or preconditions in your market or the world coming up, you can adapt faster, with more employee buy-in and less operational risk.
The benefits of better synchronization between business (people) and IT allow us to approach the competitor chain differently.
For example:
- Faster time-to-market
- Increased profitability
- Better customer experience
- Improved collaboration
- Greater industry and IT agility
- Strategic technological transformation
Download now: Make continuous process transformation a core business competency.
Four Steps to Better Business and IT Alignment
While it may seem intuitive, many organizations struggle to achieve the elusive goal of business and IT alignment. This is not only because alignment is a cumbersome and lengthy process, but because the overall process is made up of many smaller sub-processes. Each of these sub-processes lacks a definitive start and ending point. Instead, each one comprises some “learn and do” cycles that incrementally connect.
These cycles aren’t simple fixes, and this explains why issues still exist in the modern digital world. But by establishing a common language, building internal business relationships, ensuring transparency, and developing precise corporate plans of action, the bridge between the two stabilizes.
These four steps can enable you to position your business and IT alignment strategies:
- Plan: Translate business objectives into measurable IT services, so resources are effectively allocated to maximize turnover and ROI - This step requires ongoing communication between business and IT leaders.
- Model: IT designs infrastructure to increase business value and optimize operations - IT must understand business needs and ensure that they are implementing systems critical to business services.
- Manage: Service is delivered based on company objectives and expectations - IT must act as a single point-of-service request, and prioritize those requests based on pre-defined priorities.
- Measure: Improvement of cross-organization visibility and service level commitments - While metrics are essential, it is crucial that IT ensures a business context to what they are measuring and keeps a clear relationship between the measured parameter and business goals.
Being in the Know
Temporarily rotating IT employees within business operations is also a top strategy in reaching business and IT alignment because it circulates company knowledge. This cross-pollination encourages better relationships between the IT department and other silos and broadens skill-sets, especially for entry-level employees.
Better knowledge depth gives the organization more flexibility with well-rounded employees who can fill various roles as demand arises.
Supporting Business and IT Alignment
Both business and IT leaders are looking to technology as the critical lever for transformation. Over the last 10 to 20 years, the interdependencies across business processes, data quality, and systems landscapes have grown in complexity, making it hard to understand, let alone adapt or adjust. This is why it is essential to have a comprehensive business transformation portfolio encompassing the functionality needed for organizations to be agile, dynamic and adaptable.
Changes in process, people, applications and data are what drive transformations, so it’s important to have the right solutions that connect across these dimensions and provide both the tooling and the end-to-end methodology to guide you every step of the way.
The SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite and LeanIX now work together to enable an end-to-end, people-first and data-driven transformation approach. At each step of the transformation journey, SAP Signavio solutions and LeanIX empower organizations to discover, analyze, design, implement and operate optimized business processes and their related technology applications - complementing each other and mirroring value on the business and IT level by facilitating collaboration and ensuring visibility throughout the enterprise.
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Discover how SAP Signavio solutions can put your organization on the path to continuous improvement. Try for yourself by registering now for a free 30-day trial.