The IT and Business Partnership

The modern IT organisation relies heavily upon quality information and effective information systems in order to achieve success. Many factors, however, come to light in the business/IT enterprise that hinder the alignment of IT activities with business strategies (Business-IT Alignment). This can result in the failure of IT projects, chronic misalignment of the IT sector with the business sector, and the formation of pathological and bureaucratic organisations, rather than generative ones. In this Chapter, the above notions as well as the concept of Lean IT will be discussed with focus being placed on management strategies that align business with IT and what this would mean for the modern IT organisation and its corporate counterpart.

Let’s use bees and their hive as analogy for our organisation and its sectors. Every worker bee has a job to perform that will benefit the hive. Each bee performs their job with precision and accuracy knowing that, each time they succeed, various parts of the hive will be benefited and honey will be produced successfully. Any misalignment that may occur will result in unsuccessful honey production and destruction of the hive. The modern IT organisation must function in the same way. Each sector of the organisation – specifically the business and IT sectors – must be aligned with one another to ensure that they perform together effectively to benefit the entire organisation (i.e. the hive) and successfully churn out the product for their consumers. This is a problem that is seen in current modern IT organisations. The business sector does not have the correct perception of the IT sector, and vice versa. This results in misalignment that is detrimental to the organisation and its functionality.

Figure 1: Different views around Business-IT Alignment (Adapted from Bell and Orzen)

The above image exhibits the varying perceptions of IT and business within IT organisations, consisting of some of the most prominent issues that businesses perceive within the IT sector, and vice versa. As we can see, the stakeholders within the IT and business divisions frequently struggle to find common ground and remain foreign to each other even though they function within the same space and should be working together to reach a common goal. This results in misalignment that can force isolation of the IT organisation from the business operations they support resulting in a lack of mutual respect and inefficiency within the organisation. The business and IT sectors remain separate and isolated from each other, perpetuating misalignment. In this situation, when referring back to our bee analogy, it can be said that the hive is not as successful as it should be in producing honey because the various worker bees are not working together effectively. This is illustrated in the image below.

Figure 2: When business and IT not align

Business Bee’s idea of how the hive should be functioning does not match up with IT Bee’s perception, thus the hive suffers due to miscommunication and the honey is not churned out as effectively and efficiently as it could be. This same situation is seen in misaligned IT organisations.

Misalignment between business and IT sectors within an organisation can also be caused by variations in information flow and organisational culture within the organisation that may not be conducive to a supportive and understanding environment between business and IT sectors. These detrimental cultures include:

• Pathological (power-oriented) structured on fear and threat. People within these organisations may withhold information for their own gain or for political reasons. In our analogy, this would be like one bee deciding that they want to keep the honey they make to themselves in order to make themselves look better rather than to benefit the hive, causing a decrease in efficiency of honey production.
• Bureaucratic (rule-oriented) structured in a way to protect individual departments causing segmentation of these departments and lack of intersectionality within the organisation. In our analogy, this would involve the various types of bees (worker, queen etc.) forming their own departments with their own rules about making honey, causing segmentation within the hive and decreasing honey production.

To avoid this, a positive organisational structure must be introduced into the organisation to ensure effective information flow and proper communication between the business and IT sectors of the organisation. This culture is:

• Generative (performance-oriented) structured on a common goal or mission that the organisation wishes to achieve. Focus is placed on how to achieve this goal with the greatest efficiency and to ensure good performance. In our analogy, this involves all the bees working together and communicating successfully to produce the best honey that they can produce.

This table illustrates the management differences between the aforementioned organisational cultures. It is clear that the generative approach is far more conducive for a cooperative and functional relationship between the IT and business sectors within an organisation, ensuring successful functionality of the organisation as a whole.

Pathological	Bureaucratic	Generative
Low cooperation	Modest cooperation	High cooperation
Messengers shot	Messengers neglected	Messengers trained
Responsibilities shirked	Narrow responsibilities	Risks are shared
Bridging discourage	Bridging tolerated	Bridging encourage
Failure leads to scapegoating	Failure leads to justice	Failure leads to enquiry
Novelty crushed	Novelty leads to problems	Novelty implemented

Table 1: Westrum's Pathological, Bureaucratic and Generative enterprises (Adapted from Humble and Farley)

This, essentially, is the aim of the Lean IT approach: to ensure process improvement throughout the entire organisation by aligning all the sectors within the organisation and ensuring that the strategies of each sector align with those of the broader organisation by using the generative organisational structure. This involves process simplification to avoid unnecessary complexity and ensure mutual understanding between the business and IT sectors to improve communication. The overall goal of the Lean IT approach is to engage people using the Lean frameworks, principles, and systems in order to provide quality information flow, sustain continuous improvement and innovation, and ensure alignment between business and IT. This is what will make an IT organisation successful and should be the course taken by all modern IT organisations.

In summation, the Lean IT approach with a generative organisational structure should be the main goal for the modern IT organisation. It will ensure effective communication between IT and business sectors with the organisation which will, in turn, eradicate the misconceptions shared by these sectors. This eradication will allow the sectors to better understand each other resulting in process improvement within the organisation. This will create sustainable information flow and systems that are conducive to future innovation and bettering of the business and IT sectors, and the hive.

Resources

Bell, S., & Orzen, M. (2011). Lean IT: Enabling and sustaining your Lean Transformation. CRC Press.

Humble, J., Molesky, J. & O'Reilly, B. (2015). Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organisations Innovate at Scale. O'Reilly Media.

7 Steps to Business and IT Alignment

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A typology of organisational cultures

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