Business and IT Alignment: Estimating the Costs of the Initiative

by Tushar K. Hazra

Senior leadership is often interested in identifying estimated costs before they approve any business-IT alignment or related projects. In some cases, the exercise of investigating the costs involve rigorous and meticulous due diligence as well as arduous cost/benefits analyses. In other cases, as assigned teams, we have used prior experience, calculated guesswork, and a combination of high-level estimation of the tasks involved to come up with the numbers. In very few other cases, the practitioners involved in the cost estimation process have taken the "middle of the road" approach and considered a weighted combination of high-level work breakdown structure (WBS) or WBS-based estimates and extremely detailed and granular task-level costs to formulate their financial estimations.