IT and Business: Stayin' Aligned

Computerworld - I just returned from a conference for CIOs, where one of the main topics was the elusive quest for IT-business alignment. It is not, of course, a new challenge. Good CIOs have long been chasing business leaders, trying to forge better working relationships.
The goal of IT-businesses alignment is to help the organization reach its goals by improving the outcome of IT initiatives. A poorly aligned IT organization is one that's unable to respond to the needs of the business (which change all the time, by the way).
Therefore, well-intentioned IT leaders are forced to try to divine the business strategy -- which is often missing or poorly articulated -- and do what it takes to get in step. Given the dynamic nature of business, this is difficult at best.
I don't mean to be negative about IT-business alignment. It's a worthy goal. In fact, it's really the only way to approach your job, unless you're content with the role of keeper of infrastructure.
But to see why it's so difficult to achieve, let's look at alignment as it pertains to ERP applications. During the height of ERP implementations, IT organizations and business units sat shoulder to shoulder to build systems that would be well matched to their companies' business processes.
Even if those ERP teams succeeded (and the likelihood was probably equal to that of winning a coin toss), today those companies are lamenting that their ERP systems have become too rigid and inflexible. The result? IT (the organization) appears to be out of alignment in a big way because of IT (the technology).
ERP is probably one of the most dramatic and challenging examples of the problem with the quest for alignment between the business and the IT organization. It illustrates the main point CIOs have to recognize: Alignment is a moving target, not a permanent condition. Moreover, the likelihood of achieving it is slim at best unless the CIO understands certain things. Here are a few of them:
• Infrastructure, while essential, adds little value to the business and isn't a big opportunity for IT-business alignment. It's certainly important to have an efficient and reliable infrastructure that supports business initiatives. But when many IT leaders spend 80% of their budgets and almost 100% of their time on these activities, there's no energy left to pursue real alignment.
• Functionality that doesn't differentiate your organization shouldn't be developed. A key part of IT-business alignment is for the business to be able to use IT to achieve its goals.