Saturday, May 11, 2019

Harmonizing IT via Alignment, Integration, and Optimization

Organizations that have a high mature strategic alignment, integration, collaboration, or harmony will outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to the business dynamic.

The dawn of the digital era means the increasing pace of changes, the exponential growth of information, the continuous disruptions often led by digital technologies and the fierce competitions. Digital IT is no longer that isolated support function or a business controller to maintain the "status quo" only. The IT organization today should be integral to and knowledgeable of the business, aligned with enterprise objectives, and optimize the organizational structures and functions, as an enabler, a facilitator, and a harmonizer.

Strategic alignment: Strategic alignment is about translating the business strategy into operational activities and aligning the organization to create business synergy. IT-business misalignment enlarges the business gap and decelerates the organizational speed. The misalignment is usually caused by silo thinking, miscommunication, lack of cross-functional understanding, or simply wrong people put in the wrong position to solve the wrong problems. It’s important in working to a common goal by making the strategy everyone’s daily work and continual process mobilizing changes through digital synchronization. IT-business alignment addresses both how IT is aligned with the business and how business should or could be aligned with IT; “keep an eye on the horizon” - look for and assess emerging technologies and determine the business viability. Alignment is a continuous process that demands continuous attention, deliberately close alignment among the company’s strategic direction, its products and services to execute the capability-based strategy. It is a persistent and pervasive problem that demands an ongoing process or capability alignment to ensure that IT and business strategies adapting effectively and efficiently together. If the strategic intent can be understood within IT and across the company, IT-business alignment process can become a smooth and harmonized process, approach a flow zone in which people are ready for moving to a fluid working environment and business executives are eager to set stages for designing and implementing strategies by staking a step-wise approach at the steadfast paces. The digital age upon us is about people and innovation. Digital IT organizations need to move alignment to the next level, from reluctant IT-business alignment for filling gaps to proactive IT- customer alignment for achieving people centricity.

Multidimensional integration:
There are technical information technology integration, operational integration, governance (GRC policy) integration or customer experience integration, etc. Integration has a set of costs and benefits that are determined by the situation on hand and what is integrated. Do not underestimate the perfect wave of combined IT-business integration of all of the exponential growth curves. The ultimate business goal for IT integration is to maximize the value from existing IT systems and the need for better business performance and responsiveness. Make IT integrated into the company with process maturity is a crucial step to ensure information consistency, ROI, security, and interoperability for running a highly responsive and high-performance business. Be cautious though, integration can be very difficult and hard to justify ROI. Because each integration effort perhaps spins off into chain reactions that may not be recognized until the budget is gone. Integrating business processes in dissimilar businesses that have little in common makes little sense. Thus, integration has to be done with a “big picture,” having the business architecture in mind that supports the strategic goals of the organization such as revenue growth, margin improvement or customer satisfaction, etc. IT effect in radical digital transformation is an integrator in knitting all critical business factors such as people, process, and technology into a differentiated set of organizational competency for implementing business strategies.


Relentless optimization: IT is in a unique position to oversee organizational structures and processes which underpin business capabilities. Effective IT management means understanding every island of operation and every workflow process to keep optimizing the organizational competency and capacity by using information technology to lower costs, improve operations and increase revenue. The goal of optimization is to eliminate unnecessary complication, but also encourage desired complexity such as design. To compete in a global marketplace and speed up the business speed, the business needs IT to ensure availability and reliability of business process automation tools or technologies so that their staff can function as effectively and efficiently as promised. CIO would be able to identify true cost savings, workflow optimizations, and additional revenue opportunities. It all boils down to optimizing the management capacity investments with a keen eye to calculate all costs of all the projects involved. Running a business is fundamentally an iterative problem-solving continuum. If you don’t have the optimized business solution to each newly created problem, you’ll have very little changes to solve many crucial bigger business issues successfully due to the hyperconnectivity and interdependence of today’s business.

Terms such as alignment, integration, engagement, collaboration, harmony, link, fuse, affiliation, coalition, fit, match, meld, convergence are frequently used synonymously. The point is those organizations that have a high mature strategic alignment, integration, collaboration, or harmony will outperform their competitors and tend to be more responsive to the business dynamic. It means that the company working as a whole to improve communication effectiveness, harness partnership, engage employees, foster innovation, and demonstrate the multidimensional business value, to ensure long-term business success.

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