By Brian Kilcourse, Managing Partner
3/24/2009
Last week I spoke to a group of aspiring IT Managers at a meeting of the Northwestern chapter of the Society of Information Management (SIM) in San Francisco. The meeting is an annual workshop intended to help these managers grow as leaders, and as part of this year’s agenda I was asked to give a “career perspective” – kind of a “been there, done that” talk. To kick off the meeting, we did a little word association: “when I say ‘CIO’, you say….” Words I got back included an array of perspectives: “visionary,” “gatekeeper,” “challenged,” “political,” “tough,” etc. Another one was “punching bag” – and that was what I needed to launch into a discussion about the personal side of “IT alignment.”
The alignment topic has been exhaustively covered for over 20 years, and yet it remains a significant issue for businesses in every sector, not just retail. In January 2009, CIO Magazine issued the results of its annual “State of the CIO” survey, and while it showed positive indications that the quality the CIO job is improving, it also showed that there’s a lot of upside opportunity. It’s almost to be taken for granted that “aligning IT and business goals” is at the top of the list of CIO priorities, but when asked which business objective is most important for the IT function to support, the disconnect becomes clear. Whereas CIO’s in the survey said “improve end-user workforce productivity” was most important, business leaders said “acquire and retain customers.” Oops! So it should be no surprise that (according to the report), CIO’s average just 5-1/3 years at their job. The good news is that that average is up a few months from the 2006 study, and more than 3 years better than a 2002 Booz-Allen study (taken during the carnage that followed the Internet bubble burst).
Within that context, I discussed my own experiences as a CIO, and what I’d learned about the job and my own strengths and weaknesses. At the end of the talk, when I asked, “any questions?,” one participant asked, “why is ‘alignment’ the CIO’s problem? If IT is so important to business process enablement, why is it all on the CIO?” I’ll bet that this was the guy who offered up “punching bag” in the word association exercise!
Good question!
RSR is currently sifting through recent survey responses to its own study on IT and Business Alignment in Retail, and it is clear that the IT executive is the one (and often only) executive on the hot seat to make sure that the company’s investment in IT enablement of the business is working. Consider these facts from the survey:
- Retail Winners (predictably) score higher in meeting or exceeding the business’s expectations of the IT function;
- Almost 60% of the survey respondents indicate that “IT leadership is largely responsible for connecting to business department leaders”;
- Over 60% of the survey respondents indicate that meeting corporate objectives is at least aided by, if not dependent on, effective IT value delivery;
- Although almost 95% of Retail Winners say that the Executive Committee approves the IT operating budget and over 80% say that the Committee also approves the IT capital plan, over 70% of those same respondents indicate that conflicting demands for IT resources is by far their biggest challenge. And that is because for over 75% Winners who responded to our survey, the Executive Committee doesn’t involve itself in prioritizing projects or reviewing project status.
Let’s make the call: Retail Winners are better “aligned” because they have over-performing IT executives, and because they drive business leadership to take an active role. Retail Winners indicate that the biggest opportunity to overcome inhibitors to improved IT value delivery is (according to over 80%), “more business involvement in IT efforts.”
There’s an ongoing argument in the technology press and on techie blogs that “IT/business alignment is dead.” This has been fueled by a recent book entitled Business/IT Fusion- How To Move Beyond Alignment And Transform IT In Your Organization, where author Peter Hinssen says, "We've been studying Alignment between business and IT for more than twenty years now. Scores of models have been developed, and enormous efforts have been spent on trying to make alignment work. But the results are horrible. Despite the huge efforts, in money and in people, the gap between business and IT has never been greater and never deeper. The relationship has never been more sour, and the attitude never more hostile."
I’m reminded of something my father used to say to me when I managed to screw up a school project and blamed everything but myself: “it’s a poor workman who blames his tools” (to quote another old truism, “it’s amazing how much smarter Dad gets the older I get….”). Businesses have engaged in “plausible deniability” for years when it comes to IT. It was easy, after all. As we have commented on in various Retail Paradox Weekly columns over time, non-IT’ers don’t “get” the language of IT. Business people don’t understand IT and they don’t want to. It’s certainly the last thing a CEO wants to spend time on.
But…why not? What’s the excuse? If the business is dependent on it, then the business better understand it. It’s time to rename the challenge: it’s Business-To-IT alignment that has to be addressed, and not the other way around.
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