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How to Align Business Goals and IT Spending

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How to Align Business Goals and IT Spending

Can seven rules help enterprises align business goals and IT spending? Tushar K. Hazra, a senior consultant at Cutter Consortium in Arlington, Mass., believes so. Here are his ground rules:

Recognize the expectations of business sponsors.

Identify the true (not derived) cost benefits of IT projects.

Review how business values will be measured. Without quantitative measures, there's no way to take corrective action.

Define the roles and responsibilities of every employee, a prerequisite for accountability.

Capture requirements for compliance with regulations, policies and procedures. "In terms of information architecture, compliance lets you do a better job," says Hazra.

Agree on periodic milestone reviews, inspections and deliverables.

Build and manage ground rules with incremental improvements from lessons learned. This offers a consistent way to manage relationships between business and IT groups.

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This was first published in October 2005

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