Alignment 101

What are we aligning? Everyone talks about the need for and benefits of alignment. Typically, this is understood to refer to aligning business and IT- but what does this really mean?

In the beginning there was alignment. An individual has an idea and forms a company. The entire business context is understood including all the needs of the business, their priority taking into account returns and risks of the efforts that may be undertaken, and the resources available to expend on these efforts. All decisions and tradeoffs are made by this single person. There is perfect alignment.

The company grows and a second person is added - and seeds of misalignment are sown. Each person is responsible for a different aspect of the business and has competing needs for the company's resources. The two must work together to align on how these should be allocated. The process of alignment implies that there are conflicting needs that must be holistically addressed and resolved.

Necessary conditions for alignment. Alignment implies mutual understanding of the needs across an organization, the ROI of addressing each one, and collaboration to prioritize where to expend resources. Most solutions represent a set of compromises where each party agrees to an imperfect, but acceptable solution. When sufficient effort is put forth this process can, on occasion, produce a solution that meets or exceeds the needs of each party at a cost less than that of the individual requests. A Win-Win situation.

How did we become misaligned? Growth, siloed business functions and processes, and incentive systems.

With growth comes increasing demands on resources - opportunities to apply those resources to various effects. More people are managing increasingly narrow pieces of the organization and rewarded for success in their own area. Growth of an area, increased power and influence are desirable and visible manifestations of success.

With the increase in people comes a geometrically expanding opportunity for collaboration. However, in practice an increase in people results in increasing focus on continued growth and power achieved by meeting specific performance objectives and improving on increasingly narrow metrics. The focus is on optimizing what gets measured. An increasingly siloed perspective makes it harder to see and understand the big picture. This incomplete perspective leads to improper perceptions of priorities and results in misalignment (conflict).

How does business grow? Frequently, when people talk about an organization a picture like the following emerges. An orderly pyramid with vision at the top and IT at the bottom. This does not reflect operational reality and often leads to misaligned business and IT processes with predictable built-in conflict.



Let's take if from the bottom. Certainly the foundation of a business is not a room full of servers in search of a vision. A picture more grounded in operational reality reflects the evolution of a business including the role of IT and the business relationship with the customer.

New Business Model


It is important to note that there are real people at the top and bottom of the pyramid. Irrespective of where people are they all rely on the technology in the middle.

Technology is subject to an inherent conflict. On one hand, requirements for new means of supporting the customer are very dynamic and processes must support development agility. On the other hand, business expects stable, reliable, secure systems which imply rigor and considerably less dynamic processes.

To achieve alignment, business must have a basic understanding of both the dynamic processes that support responding to changing business needs and the processes that assure reliable IT operations (including realistic understanding of timelines through both processes). IT must also have an understanding of the dynamic business environment including the aspects most likely to change, how often, and in what ways.

Gone are the days when business change was infrequent and predictable. Success today requires business to reinvent itself daily by creating, pricing, and servicing complex new products in sophisticated, global, dynamic regulatory environments with complex counterparty obligations all the while maintaining security and reliability in highly networked environments.

Back to alignment. From the above it is clear that collaboration is required to achieve mutual understanding of the basic business and IT environments. It is also necessary to understand and prioritize the demands on resources. IT and business must function as peers in setting business objectives.

The root. Alignment is a result of collaboration. Collaboration can occur informally as a result of personal relationships built up throughout the business. In a large organization this is not sufficient as sheer scale makes it impractical to establish relationships with everyone. Therefore, collaboration must also be formalized through processes where people are brought together to present, assess, and resolve resource allocation conflicts.

It important to keep in mind that collaboration and decision making do not imply consensus. It does, however, imply an opportunity for all voices to be heard with the expectation that when a decision is reached that it will be supported by everyone.

Alignment is not a one time event. If it is treated as a project, program, or other construct with an end it will immediately begin to decay at the end of the effort in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics.

Effective collaboration, both formal and informal, will develop to the extent that it is both culturally expected and formalized. Formalization is the easy part. Creating a culture of collaboration requires leadership started, exemplified, and rewarded by those at the highest levels in the organization. The talk must be continuously walked or there will be no credibility, collaboration will supplanted by standard office politics and turf wars, and the company will be in perpetual pursuit of alignment.

Is alignment really the issue? Asking if there is alignment, forming task forces to achieve alignment etc. misses the point. The question is not how well we are aligned but how well we collaborate.