Getting to Know You: Acquiring and Understanding the Organization's Goals and Objectives

by Kenneth G. Rau, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

At the heart of attaining strategic alignment is identifying and pursuing those initiatives, projects, and programs that best support or enable the organization's goals and objectives. Therefore, the first step to be taken by any IS function seeking to strategically align (or realign) is to confirm that they understand their parent organization's current goals and objectives and, depending on the clarity and usefulness of what is discovered, to determine what additional steps need to be taken to translate organizational goals and objectives into a form useful in achieving IS alignment.

Twenty-nine percent of firms responding to a recent survey conducted by Cutter Consortium regarding the state of strategic IS alignment report that the strategy of their IS function is not well aligned with their organization's strategy; they strongly or mostly disagree (rated 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale) with the following statement: "My organization's IS strategy is aligned with the organization's business strategy." Whether these firms are reporting that they have never been aligned or that they were once aligned and now find themselves out of alignment due to a shift in business strategy is not known. What is clear, however, is that a large portion of our respondents believe they are not currently aligned. This is probably a fair assessment of the population at large. Whether those survey participants who believe they are currently in alignment (45% strongly or mostly agree with the above statement) actually are well aligned remains to be seen.

Understanding your organization's goals and objectives, when the intent is to use them for IS alignment, involves collecting what is available, discussing what is collected with your senior organizational management to understanding intent and implications, determining whether the results are useful for IS alignment purposes, and deciding what additional steps, if any, are necessary to derive statements that can serve as a foundation for prioritizing IS initiatives. The results of such a discovery effort will typically conclude that your organizational goals and objectives fall into one of the following four categories:

• Category 1 -- our organizational goals and objectives are nonexistent or so informal and/or contradictory as to be of no value for IS alignment purposes.

• Category 2 -- our organizational goals and objectives are published, shared, and consistent, but vague, unexceptional, and of little use for IS alignment.

• Category 3 -- our organizational goals and objectives are published, shared, consistent, and definitive for IS alignment.

• Category 4 -- our organizational goals and objectives are rigorous, methodologically developed, institutionalized, and include IS objectives, metrics, targets, and initiatives.

You are, of course, unlikely to find that your organization's goals and objectives fit neatly or cleanly into any one of these four categories. You may need to devise a compromise approach for dealing with your exact situation.

-- Kenneth G. Rau, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium