Business-IT Alignment: It's All In The Mind

It's almost impossible to spend time on any enterprise technology web sites these days without coming across articles about the importance of aligning an organization's technology with its business goals. Jupitermedia, our parent company, even has an entire site, bITa Planet, devoted to business-IT alignment issues.

And for good reason. It's become commonly accepted wisdom that aligning technology with business goals is a competitive imperative today. It's also common knowledge that too many enterprises are failing to adopt a cohesive business-IT alignment strategy.

A recent guest column in CIO Update places the blame on IT culture itself, noting that there is "no formal training in how to succeed as a senior executive within large corporations." The author, Tom Trainer of BTM Corp., adds:

How, then, can we seriously refer to IT people as professionals when the management science of business technology has been missing all this time? ...

We have at best been artists then, and in a great many cases we have been doing a phenomenal job. But, in its current state, it is a stretch to call what we do truly as a profession.

Fortunately, Trainer thinks things are changing, abeit slowly. He predicts technology professionals of the future "will intuitively grasp that business technology is strategic" and that the "next generation of leaders will understand they must invest in the management of technology as well as in the technology itself."