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Over the past 50 years of computing, a near-mythic quest has arisen. Urged upon us by scholars, management gurus and overzealous regulators, a state of alignment has been touted as the ultimate goal. In its broadest sense, alignment is the process of adjusting all the moving parts so they are properly positioned and in harmonious synchronization.
Total alignment hasn't happened, of course, nor is it ever likely to. There are simply too many moving parts. That's especially true in the business world, where alignment with technology is an endlessly moving target. So rather than frustrate you with roadmaps to places that don't exist, this CIO Habitat addresses the problem of misalignment and what midmarket IT leaders can do to minimize its effects.
Distilling the experience of our 105 responding organizations (78 midsized and 27 large enterprises), we identified three stages in seeking alignment:
- Assessment. Establishing who is involved and from which starting points the alignment process begins.
- Agreement. Creating consensus about what needs to be done, by whom and with what constraints.
- Execution. Ensuring follow-through on the agreed-upon business objectives.
But by far the most important ingredient of alignment is time -- and where you spend it.
Assessment
In seeking alignment, executives frequently make the mistake of failing to devote sufficient time to assess who needs to be aligned. Once you determine "who needs to be on the bus," as Jim Collins writes in Good to Great, you are ready to do what we at the IT Leadership Academy identify as most important for alignment: You have to figure out what the people on the bus are thinking.
As Figure 1 shows, we asked respondents how much time it took them to figure out how their organizations work (about 10 months) and how much time it took them to figure out company politics (about 28 months) -- nearly three times longer (though female respondents understood internal politics in six to nine months). And the most effective aligners increasingly use social networking frameworks to guide their behavior.
While social networking certainly scores high on the hype meter these days, there are some powerful and useful ideas at work here. Social networking theory posits that people play different roles within networks. The primary roles are hub, gatekeeper and pulse taker. The hub -- as in a hub-and-spoke system on a bicycle wheel -- is the central point of activity. The gatekeeper is positioned at critical pathways that connect hubs to one another within an organization. The pulse taker is connected to just about everyone via the shortest route and knows what everyone is thinking and feeling.
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