Chapter 5: Business-IT Alignment
IT is a support department that should be supporting all the other departments, and they have their own duties (data management, network management, vendor management, security management).
Some departments over rely on IT for competencies that should be developed across the company. While there is a rise in self-service tools and IT-based processes, many departments prefer to rely on their IT staff. The result causes IT to spend labor on reacting to daily tasks rather than working to improve business processes and performance. Since all departments that use IT need guidance and support, there is always competition for IT department resources
IT is technology, MIS is the business application and leveraging of IT to perform business goals. CTO = chief technology officer (hardware oriented), CIO is a liaison between business needs and information systems. The CIO should build an IT strategy that supports and aligns with the business strategy. But this is not always easy.
IT efforts should be coordinated with managerial needs and goals.
Please write your responses to these questions, and then later on consider the questions at a much deeper level. Each of these questions can take hours to consider and make a managerial plan for.

  1. Page 57 – “Business success depends on the linkage of business strategy, IT strategy, org/ITinfrastructure and processes.” Is this true for your company?
    If your company has an IT department do they seem to ‘be on the same page’ as the rest of the company or ‘doing their own thing’?
    ______
    ______
    ______
  2. Does your IT team seem to have a strategy? Or do they just work on daily tasks and support requests?
    ______
    ______
    ______
  3. How often does a member of the IT department sit in on strategic managerial meetings? Is there a ‘C’
    or at least VP level IT manager sitting on top management meetings?
    ______
    ______
    ______
  4. How does technology hold back your firm from being more productive, or competitive?If there is, does this problem stem from within the department (lack of capabilities/skills), or a problem of the technology components, a human problem caused by the IT staff, or attributed to lack of alignment amongst IT and other departments? Or ??
    ______
    ______
    ______
  1. If you have IT employees, do you understand what they do? Not how they do their tasks, but their aims and objectives? What efforts or tasks do support IT do that improves your firm’s competitiveness, or win deals?
    ______
    ______
    ______
  2. What is the level of integration amongst IT and non-IT? (In the USA many IT workers are ‘too busy’ to help other employees, and further they don’t want to, believing in the self-service model. Many IT departments do not have a ‘help desk’ as the IT workers are highly specialized developers, analysts, security specialists, etc.)
    ______
    ______
    ______
  3. If you were to implement a CRM system, do you have any IT employees that understand business processes and can help with that, or would you completely need a consulting firm? Or would your firm need to ‘figure it out with the CRM vendor? Now are you understanding why so many CRM initiatives fail?
    ______
    ______
    ______
    ______
  1. Page 58 – IT flexibility – if you do have an IT staff, are they implementing new technologies regularly? Are they able to add new functionality to the systems being used? Is the IT infrastructure rigid and hard to extend?
    ______
    ______
    ______
  2. If you have an IT staff or workers, do they use business terms when talking to non IT specialists, or are they often using ‘IT-speak’ that nobody understands?
    ______
    ______
    ______
  3. Page 61 – communication. Please read the paragraph on communication. Is there a mutual understanding of each other’s needs, processes and capabilities, etc. amongst IT and non-IT workers?
    ______
    ______
    ______
  4. Page 61 discusses the need for trust amongst employees. Is there trust in the IT employees?
    ______
    ______
    ______
  1. Pg 64 cautions that departments that are mutually ignorant of each other’s processes can suffer during CRM implementation when inter-departmental workflows are problematic. Is there a need for a little cross-training in your firm?
    ______
    ______
    Exercise: Write one page to assess your firms’ IT-business strategic alignment.