The biggest obstacles between you and alignment -- and how to avoid  them

The catalog of best practices grows daily as enterprises seek to align IT resources and processes to directly support critical business objectives. So, too, does the catalog of potential hurdles faced by those pursuing alignment.

Indeed, a recent survey of 200 IT executives by Deloitte Consulting and IDG Research Services found that 96 percent anticipated a positive bottom-line impact if they could improve alignment -- but only 10 percent could claim their alignment efforts were extremely successful.

Here, we've identified four major alignment traps and provided expert advice  on how you can avoid or overcome them.

Trap 1: The Great Wall

Analysts say that when many enterprises begin exploring business-IT alignment, they run into a chicken-and-egg problem: They need alignment largely because, metaphorically speaking, IT and business are working on opposite sides of a high wall, with both tossing needs, demands, and blame back and forth. While alignment is clearly necessary, the biggest obstacle may indeed be that seemingly insurmountable wall itself. So any serious initiative must start with tearing it down.

Tim Buckley, CIO at the Vanguard Group, an investment management business based in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, has advice worth listening to -- the investment giant was well ahead of the curve, beginning its alignment initiative in 1992. "Even then, it was clear that IT would be a differentiator for us," Buckley says. "Now, 80 percent of our business comes through our Web site."

Vanguard's approach to breaking down the barriers to alignment was extremely innovative more than a decade ago, and is still rare today: The company reorganized its systems development around the departments and business units that ultimately used the technology while consolidating all infrastructure operations. That meant creating one development group for the company's institutional retirement business, one for retail, and so on. "There are huge advantages to this," Buckley says. For starters, such a system "ensures that IT people need to understand only a single client -- and since we insist that IT employees know their client's business inside and out, one client is plenty."

Moreover, Vanguard found that the increased autonomy allowed various business groups to react more quickly to unique market pressures. Over the past decade, IT has been advised to decentralize -- or recentralize -- so many times that CIOs can be forgiven if they have a case of whiplash. But the experiences of Vanguard and other leading enterprises make a powerful argument for IT organizations that revolve around individual lines of business.

Trap 2: New Strategies, Old Tactics

Enterprises seeking to align business and IT often get deep into the process before realizing that they need to adjust their approach to metrics. They must, for example, expand their concept of traditional service-level agreements (SLAs), which focus primarily on technology, to include measuring service from an end-user perspective. According to Lee Adams, of the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), a crucial challenge involves changing the IT mind-set from being focused on components to being focused on business services. Technologists are accustomed to tracking network outages, latency times, and server availability, but the idea of measuring the end-to-end quality of, say, a customer's online care-center query is new territory. HCA has addressed this by devising its own state-of-the-art metrics for measuring and understanding client experiences in real time.

Trap 3: A Failure to Communicate

Once an enterprise commits itself to alignment, IT must communicate to both senior executives and end users that the company has embarked on the journey, and that while impressive benefits will be seen quickly, everyone should take and communicate a long-term view across business and IT lines. This can be problematic in IT organizations that have historically not communicated well.

As a Forrester Research report puts it: "It is characteristic of IT shops that are considered not aligned to have a poor track record regarding communication of IT's successes and capabilities to the business." In contrast, researchers say that in aligned organizations, CIOs not only communicate in business terms -- a prerequisite in today's world -- but can "see things from the business perspective and recommend technology-based innovations that make a material difference to the bottom line."

When undertaking an effort as challenging and broad as alignment, IT groups don't stand a chance without the enthusiastic support of top management. Vanguard's Buckley says business managers' support was a key reason for the company's alignment success. "Starting with the CEO, all our business leaders get it," he says. "They've always been strong advocates of IT."

That buy-in is critical, but Vanguard's efforts are not limited to the boardroom. The company stresses two-way communication of business and technology issues at all levels. Indeed, Buckley is proud that during especially busy periods, IT employees routinely help staff the customer care center. "We spent thousands of hours doing that last year," he says. On the front lines, IT workers learn what it's like to use the applications they've created, and gain an appreciation of operations. "It's amazing the ideas that come out of that process," he adds.

Does a commitment to aligning business priorities and technology use bring fresh challenges to the IT organization and the enterprise as a whole? Sure. But as Vanguard's experience shows, companies are finding creative ways to meet those challenges.

Trap 4: Focusing on Technology or Process

An easy trap is to concentrate too much on either process or technology, rather than to develop them in tandem. Like a football team, you need to have a good defense and a good offense to win championships. A coach who concentrates too much on one at the expense of the other will win nothing. Purists would say that the process comes first, but what is the point of developing a process that creates more manual activities? Can you imagine the reaction of a business manager asked by IT to perform some manual activities as part of business alignment?

"Whether following ITIL [IT Information Library] principles or not, IT organizations must develop processes that are efficient, have minimum human intervention, and are cost-effective and reliable," says industry luminary and author Malcolm Fry. "This can only be achieved by focusing on process and technology at the same time. Remember that, to achieve business alignment, we have to align IT processes with the business processes, and often, technology is the only way to successfully integrate and align these processes."