budyana

Business and IT. alignment through intelligent governance and use process management (BPM) and shared services (SOA) as tools to achieve the alignment

31 Jan 2011 at 06:26

indra

The wedding of BPM and SOA was forecast for a number of years. These days it appears the marriage is working. SOA implementers are witnessing a shift in application development that leads to better business–IT alignment. There is evidence that BPM and SOA are being used together, and observers contend that the resulting applications leverage SOA and meet business needs. Next stop: cloud computing!

According to a recent Forrester Research report on the middleware software market, BPM has been a way to show ROI for a SOA investment. The report acknowledged that most CIOs have difficulty proving the business value of SOA, but also suggested the worth of SOA can be proven through BPM. From the report: “The business units of many larger companies are appreciating the direct business value of BPM projects and realize that these projects are significantly easier and cheaper if the systems are already part of SOA.”

Accordingly, the large SOA players have been building out BPM solutions as part of their middleware stacks, and many of the pure-play vendors have been acquired.

Business-IT (B/I) Alignment

31 Jan 2011 at 05:58

indra

IT Alignment

1 Comment

Business-IT alignment

Wiki’s said, Business-IT alignment is a desired state in which a business organization is able to use information technology (IT) effectively to achieve business objectives – typically improved financial performance or marketplace competitiveness. Some definitions focus more on outcomes (the ability of IT to produce business value) than means (the harmony between IT and business decision-makers within the organizations); for example,

alignment is the capacity to demonstrate a positive relationship between information technologies and the accepted financial measures of performance.

This alignment is in contrast to what is often experienced in organizations: IT and business professionals unable to bridge the gap between themselves because of differences in objectives, culture, and incentives and a mutual ignorance for the other group’s body of knowledge. This rift generally results in expensive IT systems that do not provide adequate return on investment. For this reason, the search for Business / IT Alignment is closely associated with attempts to improve the business value of IT investments.

It is not unusual for business and IT professionals within an organization to experience conflict and in-fighting as lack of mutual understanding and the failure to produce desired results leads to blaming and mistrust. The search for B/I alignment often includes efforts to establish trust between these two groups and a mechanism for consensus decision-making.

B/I Strategy Alignment

There are several strategy in B/I alignment, but the big ideas of this strategy have 2 big lines : Business and IT strategy, Organization infrastructure and Informational Infrastructure process.

In recent years, information technology (IT) has become a critical tool for the execution of business strategy and a driver of business strategy. The alignment of business strategy and IT strategy has emerged as a critical issue for organizations. Using a case study approach, this research study identifies the reasons why alignment gaps exist between business strategy and IT strategy and suggests methods which can be used to minimize those strategy alignment gaps. Senior executives at a large Fortune 50 financial services company were interviewed in order to examine whether alignment gaps between business strategy and IT strategy existed at this organization, the reasons why the strategy alignment gaps exist, and how the strategy alignment gaps could be minimized. The results suggest that improving the business strategy and vision, and communication of the business strategy and vision has the greatest potential for improving the alignment of business strategy and IT strategy. The degree of alignment between various business areas was found to have a major impact on the alignment of business strategy and IT strategy.