Aligning technologies with the business needs is a challenge that every organisation, whether a one-man operation or thousands of employees enterprise, is facing on a daily basis.

How many times we have seen division between the business and the technical staff? The business so often sees IT as reducing business agility. The IT Department sees the business as making impossible demands and blames it for refusing to consult IT before entering into acquisition discussions, for example. This can lead to distrust and might resulted in CIO being excluded from business decisions and the business will try to circumnavigate the IT Department in every opportunity. The IT Department is then designs and builds the IT systems with little consultation from the business. Large and expensive IT initiatives can be disregarded by the business and become redundant.

Reminder: we need IT Systems to allow for growth, increase efficiencies and productivity! IT is in place to support the business!

Business needs are changing. In the 1980s John Zachman conceived the Zachman Framework, to become a new field later known as Enterprise Architecture. It initially began to address two problems:

1. Systems complexity—organisations are spending more and more money building systems
2. Poor business alignment—organisations are finding it more and more difficult to keep those increasingly expensive IT systems aligned with business needs.

The bottom line: more cost, less value. The cost and complexity of IT systems have exponentially increased, while the likelihood of deriving real value from those systems have dramatically decreased.

In healthy organisation the business is determining the requirements for IT. Top management is involved and supportive. Good liaisoning or ‘IT Champions’ exist within the business to work with the technical team is a must (filling the gaps, remember). 

IT departments should fall behind the business strategy and play the catch-up game. In a healthy business IT should be 3-12 months ‘behind’ the business in terms of implementation of new systems (depending on projects size of course). If IT introduces new functionally for systems and the business didn’t request them or doesn’t understand why the new functionally can improve the way we do business it means that the IT department is ahead of the business, which is probably not a healthy position to be in.

What else can be done?

1. Educate (learn from within; what do we need today? Tomorrow? What’s available ‘out there’?)
2. Invest long term (systems are expensive to license, implement, integrate, support)
3. Evolve with the business (IT should ‘fall behind’)
4. Decommission old systems or functionality within a system which is not being used
5. Hire the right people – combination of Business Analysis knowledge and hands on technical ability is the dream resource of every IT manager
6. Get the business involved from the top down

If the organisation is mature enough, it should start to develop (and maintain) its Enterprise Architecture by employing a methodology such as Zachman, TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework),  FEA(Federal Enterprise Architecture) or get a consultancy company such as Gartner to implement their own developed methodology. Implement an EA and modelling tool for the enterprise in order to communicate your architecture to the business and gain its support. Tools like EA by Sparxs, ARIS by IDS Scheer, Corporate Modeller by Casewise or MEGA Architecture by MEGA have a publication option to release the models to the local intranet website.

Gil Hidas is an IT Applications specialist, ITIL and Oracle Certified and Entrepreneur