Ways to Soften Organizational Resistance to Alignment

by John Berry, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

With an almost evangelical fervor surrounding it, the steady flow of rhetoric concerning alignment of IT with the business side of the organization assumes that if the IT organization pushes for it, business units will enthusiastically embrace it. Often, this is not true, and IT managers must prepare for those occasions when the technology organization is truly ready to transform how it interacts with business units when everyone else isn't.

It is rather ironic that such a situation could exist when you figure that greater alignment benefits business units as much if not more than the IT organization. Alignment is supposed to signify a greater awareness from IT about what the goals of the business are and how IT can help managers achieve them through relevant technology provisioning and providing a far improved service experience to users. Yet business managers might not see aspirations of alignment doing them a favor, at least not right away. The IT organization must prepare carefully to win over business leaders and pave the path to alignment success.

Consider the following issues as a means of breaking through the barriers that can are often erected when the CIO and his/her organization embark on an alignment campaign.

Understand how the IT organization is perceived first. The utility services view of IT is a common attitude among business managers because of the IT organization's provenance. Before technology truly ran every facet of the business, IT was perceived as passive order takers; business would request a technology, and IT would deliver it, successfully or not. Many technology organizations are still viewed this way, where the CIO is not yet perceived as a business partner. In those organizations where IT is held in lower esteem, take the full measure of these perceptions first because business managers will likely feel threatened by a suddenly assertive CIO seeking far greater input into business deliberations and questioning decisions around future technology plans. No magic formula exists to eliminate these attitudes. Know they are there and work with managers as closely as they desire to develop the shared understanding required as such an effort is launched.

Sell alignment like a product. Features and benefits: paint a vivid picture managers can embrace. This is one way of diffusing organizational resistance to IT's alignment aspirations. What are the features of alignment? That is, what are the specific objectives or goals that help achieve greater IT-business alignment? One example is that IT wants to establish a working group of IT managers and business unit leaders for a regular dialogue about future business aspirations and challenges and how IT can help business units through these problems. Once the concrete features of alignment objectives have been described, then illustrate the benefits. If this planning is well conceived, the benefits should sell themselves. In the case of a collaborative effort just described, benefits could be lower cost to provision technology, less time to provision technology, and greater application uptime arising out of a better understanding of each side's respective capabilities and challenges.

Why alignment, why now? If IT is suddenly pushing for greater alignment, is there a specific reason, a specific business circumstance? Alternatively, has IT just awakened one day and concluded that this day is the day to begin improving alignment. What is going on in the business where greater IT-business alignment can genuinely prove supportive? Use this circumstance as a backdrop for every discussion IT has with business leaders in its search for greater alignment. For example, a company might be experiencing rapid growth. IT certainly can support that growth with new technology or the reengineering of existing technology so that business processes are streamlined for greater effectiveness and efficiency. These impacts could affect every aspect of the business, from customer management to supply chains to salesforce management. Even if the motivation for alignment in IT managers was not provoked by specific business conditions but rather a general, nagging sense that it was not delivering to its value potential, tie that alignment desire to business goals and circumstances. Alignment will have a saliency that can win over managers since its rationale is framed around a relevant business context.

Never assume that others recognize the value of anything without specifically pointing out that value. (Just ask any manager undeservedly passed over for a promotion or a product manager whose true innovative product sank like a stone for poor marketing execution.) Alignment is pitched to IT managers constantly and relentlessly as an assumed good, like justice and mercy. Just because IT becomes a true believer doesn't necessarily translate into automatic acceptance with others in the organization, as disappointing a fact as that is. Alignment means change and no one likes change. You'll have to win over the skeptics, which takes planning. Kernels of that planning are in this Advisor. I welcome your comments on this issue of the Cutter Edge and encourage you to send your insights on the market in general to me at jberry@cutter.com.

-- John Berry, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium