Business and Technology have co-existed within organisations for as long as commerce itself. They have evolved to be intrinsically linked and co-dependent. The success of one is wholly dependent on the success of other and vice versa. And yet they have taken increasingly separated evolutionary paths, creating a gap between them that could lead to extinction of the organisations that fails to find a way of bridging this gap.
Most of us are all too ready to accept that business people are from one planet and talk about strategy, growth, markets and external influences and that IT people are from a different planet and talk about platforms, networks, legacy systems and integration, and so the two can never be truly aligned, Right?
Wrong. In today’s increasingly competitive and uncertain commercial world, smart business leaders recognise that bridging this gap is more critical than ever. The rate of technology advancement is enabling new business models functions and processes that are helping to redefine how we do business. This is why I am constantly surprised by the number of people that believe that their company is either too big or small to be vulnerable to technology change, or that disruptive IT hasn’t reached their industry yet or that their particular industry is somehow more immune to the tech-enabled disruption we have seen from the likes of Uber, Airbnb, Google, Alibaba, Facebook and Waze. More fool them.
No business is immune; the rate of technology change is impacting businesses of all sizes across all sectors, driven by the need for customer centric operating models, increased productivity and new business opportunities. Accessibility to increasingly capable technology and the demand to do more with data is growing exponentially. Technology enablement is now a pre-requite to success and at its heart is Business and IT alignment.
Obviously there is a lot more to Business and IT alignment than just semantics and evolution, and it is also not just about the IT team, technology enablement is an enterprise wide journey. The good news is that bridging the gap is not as hard as some seem to think….