What CIOs Need to Know About Business Alignment
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A Big "To Do"
Nearly one-half of senior IT executives say better alignment with business needs is a top priority, which is more than double compared to a year ago. -
Ready and Able
63% of IT pros are confident in their ability to respond to the needs of business. -
Fuzzy Profile
More than one-quarter of IT pros equate the visibility of their IT department into their organization's business initiatives to "a foggy day in London," despite their confidence in IT's ability to respond to business needs. -
Business Minded
CIOs spend 37% of their time focused on business matters. -
Out of the Loop
76% of IT leaders say business applications are rolled out without engaging IT, despite the amount of time they spend on business issues. -
Best Practices: Get With Stakeholders
Identify all key stakeholders. Interview them to discuss essential business needs and pain points. -
Best Practices: IT Inventory
Match all discussed business needs and pain points to current IT capabilities that can address both of them. -
Best Practices: Identify Gaps
Assess which gaps remain in terms of IT addressing business needs and eliminating pain points. Match all subsequent tech investment to directly addressing these gaps in order to justify the strategic and business purpose of the investment. -
Best Practices: Disclose Your Biases
Pre-existing biases on both the IT and business side are perfectly understandable. To unite on strategy and vision, it's best to openly share biases to reach a common ground. -
Best Practices: Build the Right Team
Designate IT members not only for their tech and business knowledge, but their ability to collaborate and improvise.
By now, CIOs are highly aware of the C-suite's growing interest in aligning IT planning, investment and deployment with strategic business goals. Despite the fact that much of this activity is driven by the increasingly unpredictable and rapid pace of market shifts, many organizations are still moving too slowly toward this goal. CIOs and tech departments are hardly the sole parties to blame, findings show. In many cases, their best efforts are undermined by the existing corporate culture. It's difficult, after all, to work with business teams on optimal IT acquisition and usage when those same business teams go out and buy a load of apps without even telling the CIO or his or her tech team. To further illustrate the rising demand for better alignment and the subsequent challenges, we present the following industry research findings. And to help steer CIOs in the right direction to address these challenges, we're also providing five proven best practices. All statistics and best practices were compiled from research and presentations from organizations which included Deloitte, the Society for Information Management, the ROI Institute, Cisco and Serena Software.