Aligning IT with Business - Week 3 of the Tour

It’s quite an experience speaking on the IT Executive Alignment Tour and talking to IT executives from business, government, education, and non-profits about the state of IT within their organizations. It’s clear there is quite a diversity of environments which Martin Slofstra also alluded to in his conversations with IT Leaders. I’m seeing increased penetration of ITIL for operational management and COBIT on the more overall strategic level for larger enterprises. However, one item that comes up repeatedly is that the business-side of many organizations still has a hard time looking beyond IT as a maintenance function. We likely need more discussion at the national level between CEOs and IT Leaders on this front - how do you get the business side to look at IT as a Strategic Asset? At last year’s CIPS INFORMATICS Conference in late May, the roundtable between CEO and CIOs provided insights that close alignment was key to business performance. The overall impression was this coming together of executives on both sides provided a valuable forum to move this topic forward.

We talk about aligning IT with business strategy but a better choice of words could be “Aligning IT with the Organization” since IT empowers everything today.

I look forward to seeing you at the IT Executive Alignment sessions...

Cheers,
Stephen Ibaraki, FCIPS, I.S.P., MVP