Capital One Exec Addresses Alignment

John Scanlon is vice president of Line of Business Technology Management at Capital One Financial Corp. His team of business information officers is responsible for ensuring technology business alignment for all of Capital One’s domestic revenue-generating business units. What follows are his remarks upon receiving CIO Insight’s Partners in Alignment Award for his company.

The nub of why alignment is so hard is that fundamentally, you’re talking about cultural change and behavior change in people, and if you have kids and have ever tried to change their behaviors, you can understand how hard that really is at times.

Your typical technology professional has spent 10 or 20 years going to the same conferences, learning the same kind of language about how to talk about technology. Your business partners have done that as well, but they’ve been at different conferences and using different language and picking up different practices and behaviors.

I liken it a lot to a story that I’m reading a lot recently. It’s a Dr. Seuss book about two different camps of characters, one who butters its bread on the top and the other that butters its bread on the bottom. In all other respects, they’re very similar groups, but they have this seed of difference in how they view the world that really engenders difficulties in language and communication and breeds mistrust.

And that’s the challenge that we have in IT-business relationships as well. We need to find ways to build bridges so that we’re using the same language, talking about the same topics, and this will really get us to alignment in thought and in action and in practice. These bridges will also help, when things don’t seem quite right, for people to grant each other the benefit of the doubt that they at least have the right goals—that it’s just a breakdown in language, not a breakdown in intent.

One common misperception about alignment that I still run across within my own organization, even though I think we are pretty good at alignment, is that people can tend to think of it as a project rather than as a cultural change and as something you need your entire organization to wrap its arms around.

So while you may use projects and encourage using projects to move the ball forward, to get certain practices in place, it really has to be more of a cultural phenomenon, where every single associate in your IT organization cares about alignment and tries to work the practices of alignment into how they do their job. Your business partners need to make those changes as well.

I think another common misperception about alignment is that in the quest for it, we have to give up being IT. That’s not true. We do still have a functional discipline. We do still have pretty common watermarks for excellence in our functional discipline, and we don’t want to abandon any of that. Being a great IT shop, a world-class IT organization doesn’t automatically give you alignment, but I think it’s actually a necessary precondition to really be a truly aligned organization.

Many business people are now on the IT side. How does that factor into it? I think it really helps tremendously. Again, it’s not absolutely necessary that everybody be a businessperson and an IT person at the same time. It would be hard to live in a world where that were true.

But getting business dialogue in business terms happening within the IT organization really goes a long way toward getting the right kind of language and communications with your business partners. So I do think it is very helpful to have nontraditional IT background folks in major leadership positions within the IT organization.

We’ve also learned some other lessons in our quest for alignment. Two things readily come to mind. The first is: Don’t try and prove that you’re aligned. It’s kind of an unprovable thing; it’s a never-ending quest. I do think that tools and techniques like the Balanced Scorecard and lots of other approaches to get the conversations going and demonstrate that you have the right intent are absolutely essential, but it is ultimately unprovable, and the more you try, the less aligned your business partners will feel that you are.

CIO Insight Staff
CIO Insight Staff
CIO Insight offers thought leadership and best practices in the IT security and management industry while providing expert recommendations on software solutions for IT leaders. It is the trusted resource for security professionals who need network monitoring technology and solutions to maintain regulatory compliance for their teams and organizations.

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