Consortium :: Special Offer: Negotiating the Path to Business Ar. Vol. 21, No. 12, December 2008 Seven Rules of Business Alignment by Alan Inglis In this article, I describe an operating model for business alignment drawn from 27 years of experience, working for both consultancies and major end-user organizations in a variety of industries. The key points that come out of this experience are: Alignment among all parties involved in business change is the issue: the business consists of multiple parties that need to be aligned; IT is just one of these parties.
The starting point for alignment is communication. Anglo-American business communication has evolved a terse and concise style that is accepted as conventional wisdom. This point is relevant in the discussion of alignment. Alignment Rule #1: Communicate effectively. Before I get into the core discussion, I need to set out some definitions to try to avoid misalignment of understanding and expectation. Table 1 -- Alignment Terms Defined Alignment Rule #2: Develop a shared vocabulary. Program Planning. Growing Pains: Can Web 2.0 Evolve Into An Enterprise Technology? Wikis, mashups, social networking, and even Second Life can have a place in business, but they need to improve legacy interoperability--and IT needs to overcome its skepticism. Forget outsourcing. the real threat to IT pros could be Web 2.0. While there's a lot of hype and hubris surrounding wikis, mashups, and social networking, there's also a lot of real innovation--much of it coming from increasingly tech-savvy business users, not the IT department.
"We've cut IT staff by 20%, and we're providing a whole lot more in terms of IT services," says Ken Harris, CIO at nutritional products manufacturer Shaklee. Harris started with a mashup platform from StrikeIron; he found mashups such an effective way to integrate multiple Web services that he turned to Web-based service providers to replace in-house functions. Now, Shaklee gets its ERP from Workday and search from Visual Sciences, and it's looking at other IT functions that software as a service can replace. (click image for larger view)
Gabriel_Morgan : Traceability from Biz Strategy to Application t. Recently, I’ve had a number of conversations with folks regarding concepts at the enterprise-level mostly focused on traceability from some architecture concept to Business Strategy. After all, if someone asserts an architecture concept and it isn’t traceable to a Business Strategy there is a natural reflex to question its purpose.
Here’s a view of a simple model illustrating the relationship between major enterprise concepts. Let me describe each model element to make the model more clear: · Business Strategy. This is the actual stated buisness direction that a company declares with the purpose of providing directional statements with measurable goals to its organization. o Purpose: Statement of business direction o Example: ‘Increase revenue in enterprise customer accounts by delivering large, industry vertical solutions by 10% in FY08’ · Business Process.
O Purpose: Manage how the business executes. o Example: Process Invoice, Assign Resource, Create Offering, Sell Offering · Application. Enterprise Systems | SOA: It’s the Business that Matters.