Alignment - I couldn't have said it better...

Take a look at this article by Thomas Wailgum at CIO.com: "If IT Isn't Aligned with the Business By Now, CIOs Should Quit or Be Fired." The language is a bit harsh but the sentiment is on target. I worked for one of the best who understood this. Today, I am still amazed at the number of organizations that resist talking to their business customers and would prefer to be reactive to requests rather than responsive to business needs. The value-add is in a conceptual understanding of needs - which is realized in conversation - and providing guidance and counsel in achieving the business goals. Anything less relegates IT to the line item expense on the monthly budget statement.

An All Too Common Scapegoat

An article in this morning's press, United Health billing flaws persisted as company grew in Sunday's Star Tribune brings to the forefront a very common problem aggravated by the disconnect between business and information technology. The article points the blame for United Health's bill paying delinquency directly at the rapid growth of the company and information technology's inability to keep pace. Ouch!

Rapid growth and IT's lagging responsiveness is a convenient scape goat. Athough (with credit to the article's author) these problems at United have been reported since 2004, IT is perceived as one of the villains. What is an IT leader to do? Take these press clippings with a grain of salt. As any process improvement practitioner will tell you, the reason for faults and service inadequacy lie among a number of contributing causes. One contributing cause will usually percolate to the surface as the primary underlying cause. That said, however, IT needs to leverage these negative stories and vigorously work to mitigate such failures by:

• Identifying the variables that impact service provisioning;
• Constantly and relentlessly drive improvement by eliminating or controlling these variables;
  
• Talking to the customers of IT and capturing their needs in formal agreements;
  
• Continuously lobbying to positioning IT as a partner in strategic decision making.

Let's remove the all too common tendency of management to identify IT as an easy scapegoat.