Literature has focused the alignment problem at strategic or tactical levels. However, there’s more to alignment. While alignment starts with the conceptual (business objectives, for example), it must move to the concrete. The concrete is the “operational” or actual business process. Whether or not individual process elements are designed and integrated for alignment determines operational alignment. To achieve such integration requires a new method.

BACKGROUND

CEOs and CIOs have consistently articulated their concern about poor business-IT alignment. Literature suggests the following as some of the issues in alignment: poor communication between business and IT, non involvement of IT in business decisions and vice versa, no agreed definition of “Alignment,” lack of top management support, vendor management issues, IT project management issues like costs, resources, and timely delivery, and unclear business value from IT.

As solutions, literature suggests cross-pollination and better communication between business and IT, institution of steering committee called by CEO (and comprising IT and business people), setting up of a well-defined IT management framework, ROI analysis, balanced scorecard, etc.

WHY OPERATIONAL ALIGNMENT IS ELUSIVE

One clear reason why operational alignment is either absent or poor: User interfaces – where a lot of an enterprise’s business processes reside – are not integrated and implemented as a process element in the IT-enabled business process.

Therefore, even if the best strategic/tactical level principles found in literature were applied, IT would still be out of whack with business at the operational-level.

Absent or poor operational alignment shows up in various forms of waste and chaos, including: “wrong” applications that enterprises did not need; applications that should have been integrated; applications that do not optimally share process activities between system and user; and unnecessary user groups that could better contribute elsewhere in the enterprise.

DO CONVENTIONAL APPROACHES SUPPORT OPERATIONAL ALIGNMENT?

To achieve operational alignment, a method is required that (a) views the overall business process holistically, (b) integrates all the elements including the user interface, and (c) produces integrated architectures for key process elements.

Do conventional methods meet this requirement?

Take software engineering approaches: IT teams typically develop applications with no consequent changes made to the business process or to the other existing IT assets. The result is what Forrester Research founder George F. Colony calls “naked technology.” Also, software engineering approaches view and sideline the user interface (UI) as just a medium to access application functionality. The result is a focus on the human-side of application users, thereby drawing attention away from business-critical issues.

Take process improvement approaches: Typically, process improvement initiatives comprise three broad phases: (a) Understanding business strategy, objectives, etc (b) Assessing the as-is business process (c) Recommending an improved process. Recommendations sometimes do point to where new IT solutions should be introduced. However, no method or skill-set is available to either integrate the user interface or perform unified streamlining.

INTEGRATED APPROACH THAT MAINSTREAMS THE USER INTERFACE

In about a dozen instances, a new method called Process-Efficient Technology (PET) was used prior to actual software development. PET delivered benefits that typically come from good process improvement initiatives. Importantly, it not only pre-empted the typical waste and chaos associated with poorly conceived IT projects, but also ensured business-IT alignment at the operational-level.

PET is a holistic approach to unify the business-side and IT-side elements in a business process, uniquely integrating the user interface as a process element. The PET model has these phases: (a) Understanding of business strategy and objectives (b) Unified assessment of as-is business and IT elements in the process, including the UI (c) Unified streamlining with UI included as a process element. Some of the PET deliverables serve as blue prints for ensuing software development efforts.

Diverse and deep skills are required to bring together

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