Bridging The IT-Business Alignment Gap
by Tom Redman
In "Avoiding the IT Alignment Trap," which appeared in the Sloan Management Review, Fall 2007, the authors report on a survey of more than 500 senior business and technology executives that examined two key issues: the effectiveness of IT organizations and the alignment of IT organization to the business.
What did they find?
Nearly three-quarters of those polled reported that IT was neither highly aligned nor highly effective.
It is a sobering result that should lead to deep introspection.
I consult with companies on data quality. My work puts me in the white space between IT and the business and offers me a unique opportunity to comment on relationships between the two. (Note: I can only comment on what I've seen and make no claim about the generality of the following).
Virtually everyone understands that "the business" creates or otherwise obtains almost all the important data. So eliminating root causes of error, the only true way to address data quality, must fall to the business. Yet in organization after organization, the task falls to IT. Lacking ownership of the underlying business processes, IT is reduced to implementing software that combs through the data, searching for errors, and electronically correcting the mistakes it finds. Yes, it's better than nothing. But it dooms the organization to mediocre data.
From where I sit, IT is (usually) at least complicit in this mis-management.
But sometimes the situation is even darker. For example, IT leadership may discover during the later stages of a data warehouse project that they're porting bad data into the repository. At that point, it's too late to address the problem at the source, so the department might opt for a clean-up project. After all, "if we don't do this, people won't accept our warehouse." And the issue of where data quality belongs organizationally never comes up.
Obviously data quality does not represent the totality of issues between IT and the business. But it does present a useful microcosm. It is easy to see why business relationships aren't what one might hope.
That's the bad news.
Now the good news.
IT departments can use "data" to open the dialogue with the business. After all, the business cares little about the technical complexities associated in most of what IT does. But they do care about the data. And while IT may not own data, it still must provide the infrastructure, databases, and applications to get data to business customers. "Data" can thus form the "bridge" between IT and the business.
Your thoughts?
Featured Blogger Tom Redman
Tom Redman, "the Data Doc" is President of Navesink Consulting Group in Little Silver, NJ. He was the first to extend quality principles to data and information. Tom’s fourth book, Data Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset will be published by Harvard Business School Press later this year.
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