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Six Billion Minds

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The Alignment Effect

e-Enterprise

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The Alignment Effect

How to Get Real Business Value Out of Technology

Reviews

"In this soon-to-be-released guide to alignment strategy, the experiences of industry experts and Fortune 500 executives provide object lessons on the pitfalls of "technology for the sake of technology," while the author lays out the benefits of what he calls Business Technology Management (BTM) to help corporate decision-makers reduce risk and increase efficiency."

–CIO Insight Magazine

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Book Description

Why aren't we getting real business value out of technology? One thing is sure: companies that continue to repeat the mistakes of the past will never reap the rewards of the future.

Most companies fail to capitalize on the technologies they already have; and many more are poised to meet this same fate with the next big technology fad spawned in Silicon Valley and propelled by venture capitalists. Whether it's wireless, Web services, or the latest and greatest in nanotechnology, companies will never get value-real or perceived-without first solving the business/technology disconnect.

This book will begin by illustrating some of the ways the disconnect can manifest itself in the enterprise. These examples reveal an unequivocal truth: to understand, communicate, and plan how they should utilize technology in the enterprise, companies first need to align three key areas-business, process, and technology. But to achieve alignment among these areas requires a fundamentally different approach than those used before-one that brings these disciplines together in a way that all can understand.

This approach creates unprecedented visibility into how business and technology decisions are made, and provides the means for tracing decisions back and forth between the two, so that companies can discover and communicate interdependencies.

This approach is called Business Technology Management, or BTM. In this book the principles, activities, and governance that make up BTM will unfold to provide the structure and the mindset to help any company in any industry get real business value from IT.

Part I: The Business/Technology Disconnect introduces the disconnect and uses real-world examples to show the profound effect that it can have upon the enterprise. These examples, which include scenarios from integrated financial systems to human resources to call reporting, illustrate some typical conditions that can result in disconnects, as well as some of the material losses that they can produce. To begin closing the business/technology disconnect, IT departments need to address several emerging challenges. These challenges point to the need for a new approach to align business and technology: the principles, activities, and governance that make up BTM.

Part II: The Principles of BTM, examines three underlying principles that must be in place in order to perform BTM. These principles include predictive modeling, which allows project teams to create blueprints that improve design decisions and facilitate alignment; collaborative decision-making, which includes a broad range of stakeholders to make sure that competing needs are balanced; and making knowledge and assets reusable, which maximizes the value of both intellectual and physical capital.

Part III: The Activities of BTM explores business model definition, process optimization, and technology automation-the three activities that companies undertake to align business and technology. The purpose of these activities is to create an end-to-end blueprint of the enterprise architecture that is relevant to a given IT project. In order to create this blueprint, the project team relies on predictive modeling and the other principles of BTM. The activities of BTM begin by capturing a model of the current enterprise architecture, including business, process, and technology. The next step is creating multiple scenario models that correspond with the directions that the project could take. After selecting a final scenario, the final step is implementing the design created in the corresponding model and updating the current model to reflect the changes.

Part IV: Governing With BTM illustrates how the enterprise should administer BTM to achieve two goals. First, the blueprint developed during the activities of BTM helps senior decision-makers (including the CIO) to set strategic direction for how the business should put technology to work by managing the IT portfolio. Second, the design decisions captured in the blueprint become an important ingredient for helping the company maintain tactical control over their IT projects, including control over quality and cost management. Finally, since governance implies a concerted effort to incorporate BTM into the workplace, I will introduce some key roles and responsibilities for helping BTM make the jump from promise to practice.



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Authors/Contributors Faisal Hoque Industry Insights