Communication Gap
The keystone of alignment is corporate strategy. Unless strategic goals are clearly articulated and well-understood throughout the organization, IT has nothing to align itself with—cart without a horse. Yet a significant percentage of companies have no well-defined corporate strategy, according to the results of a recent CIO Insight/Balanced Scorecard Collaborative survey of IT and business executives. And even when firms do have a strategy, they do a poor job of communicating that plan to employees. Meanwhile, our business and IT respondents could not agree on the involvement of IT in the strategic planning process. So it should come as no surprise that many of them feel their companies are doing a barely adequate job aligning IT with their corporate strategies.
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The Strategic Alignment Research Study: Strategy