THE ROLE OF ADAPTABILITY IN BUSINESS-IT ALIGNMENT

25 January 2000

by Jim Highsmith

One of the key factors in misalignment is change. There is so much change, things are moving so much faster, and the business models are changing -- dramatically. We all know about the e-commerce initiatives from Internet companies such as Amazon, Dell, Cisco, and Intel. But within the last month, both Ford and General Motors announced major e-commerce initiatives. They're essentially moving toward the Dell model. Just as you can go to Dell's site and configure the kind of Dell computer you want, Ford and GM are saying you will be able to log onto their sites, configure the car you want, and three days later go to the dealer to pick it up. These are massive business model changes. And the question is, how do we align when things are changing to this degree?

In the past, business IT alignment, and management in general, viewed change as incremental and periodic. In that environment, predicting and controlling practices worked pretty well. Today, because change is more continuous and of greater magnitude, adaptive practices become critical.

One of the problems is that we're trying to answer the alignment question from a traditional perspective. We're trying to solve the problem of misalignment -- which is basically a problem of unpredictability -- by getting better at predicting. That isn't going to work. For example, we try to fix the problem of project delays by getting better at estimating things. But the underlying reality is: we just don't know what's going to happen. Getting better at estimating things we don't know is not particularly productive.

Another area for consideration is IT architecture. We have tended to look at architecture as a single structure. But it is really a structure with multiple layers, each of which are changing at different time horizons. We've tended to move from one view of architectural structure to another view of architectural structure in big leaps. What we need to do is look at layers of structure, realizing that they are all changing at a different rate. We have to determine our base layer: those areas that we don't expect to change much or that we zero in on. We might say that the base layer changes every five years, another layer changes every two or three years, and a third changes more frequently.

Layering things, rather than looking at architecture as a fixed structure, will help us look at things in a new way. The tradition was to try to solve unpredictability by getting better at predicting; in the future, we have to solve the problem of unpredictability by getting better at adapting.

-- Jim Highsmith, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium's Business-IT Alignment Advisory Service and Editor, e-Business Application Delivery
http://www.cutter.com/consortium/meet-our-experts/jhbio.html
http://www.cutter.com/ead/index.html