Aligning Marriott

Computerworld - It's 7:30 a.m., the finale of a two-day executive meeting at Marriott International Inc.'s conference center in Chantilly, Va. Carl Wilson is fielding questions from 20 of Marriott's top-volume business customers during the hotel chain's quarterly relationship-building meeting. Questions like "How could you make us more successful in our jobs as travel managers?" and "How could we work better with your supply-distribution pipeline?"
For Wilson, Marriott's executive vice president and CIO, it's just another day in the company's executive sandbox. "I attend meetings for a living," he says with a laugh. But his real reason for attending this retreat? "It's good to help shape the strategy to service our customers better."
Wilson's presence at these meetings is part of Marriott's three-year push to align its information technology group, called Information Resources (IR), with corporate strategy. And it's working so well that, because of improvements to its customer service applications, Marriott in February earned recognition from Fortune magazine as the "most admired company in the lodging industry."
Three years ago, Marriott's president and chief operating officer, William Shaw, recognized the need for more strategic IT-business alignment and acted. He hired a senior vice president of planning for Information Resources and invited the CIO into the boardroom.
Today, the business dictates every technology decision, and IR is part of the process. Thus, by erasing the lines between business and IT, Marriott has embraced what analysts say will be the key to maintaining a competitive edge in the 21st century.
"If I don't have a strategic relationship with my business partners to identify problems and opportunities to leverage information technology, then I'm bleeding critical lifeblood out of the company," says Jerry Luftman, executive director for the graduate information systems programs at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.
If your IT organization isn't represented in the boardroom like it is at Marriott, it's probably because you're not walking the business walk and talking the business talk of value, revenue and process. But by following basic stepping-stones - getting to know your business, communicating a business message and participating in planning meetings - you can bridge that gap.
Step 1: Communicate
It starts with communication, but not the type of techno-dialogue that makes an executive's eyes glaze over. Instead, IT executives need to look at the enablers and inhibitors of each IT project. Then, they need to better market their ideas in language that business executives are comfortable with, explains Luftman.
Wilson calls this "taking the mystique out of IT delivery." Corporate executives know