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If your enterprise has consensus on the strategic role that IT should play, the question of how to put it into practice remains. The CIO at a federal agency identifies an alignment trouble spot: middle management. "All the executives are on board with the vision. It's the people in the middle who don't really know what is going on," he notes. This is a subtle but important point. Even CIOs at smaller enterprises can end up disconnected from their IT staff. Their direct reports may understand the alignment imperative, but somewhere in the chain the message gets lost. Using tools of social analysis to ask the pulse takers what they're hearing can help here.
Another federal IT agency has moved aggressively to ensure that people get on the same bus. It has set up a requirements office staffed with experienced business analysts and program managers. A person in such a role generally "started as a business user of IT and morphed into the IT go-to person in the department," this executive explains.
These business liaisons are assigned to critical departments to work with department heads and key business users, ensuring that IT is used appropriately. "We also have a systems engineering group that works with middle management in business groups to determine what types of technologies are needed [and to] identify and implement solutions," this CIO says.
The CIO at a professional services firm believes that alignment has changed over the years. "During the 1990s, alignment for my organization meant the president of a business unit saying, 'I need XYZ,' and our response was to start immediately working on XYZ," he recalls. "We were judged on responsiveness and flexibility. During the recession, we transitioned to looking at projects based on business value. We started to prioritize."
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