Alignment Requires Proactive, Progressing CIO Leadership


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Alignment Requires Proactive, Progressing CIO Leadership

Michael Wood

November 10, 2009






Given IT has played a significant role in business since the 1960s, it seems almost inconceivable that CIOs are still alignment challenged.  Perhaps the challenge isn’t so much getting aligned but staying aligned given the pace and nature of change companies must cope with and adapt to in today’s global economies.   

In an article from October of 2007 entitled “Business Process Alignment – The Next Evolution of BPI”, I used a model to identify the areas within the enterprise where things can get misaligned.   As seen below the chart illustrates the various properties of an organization that can create alignment issues that impact IT.  

 


The challenge for IT is to create a culture and level of maturity that promotes Continuous Alignment Adaptability (CAA).  To achieve this culture, the CIO needs to accomplish the following:

  1. Along with other  key IT staff become a student of the IT and Line of Business industries they serve so they can understand pending events and trends that might affect IT’s alignment to the enterprise and thus position the IT organization and technologies to rapidly adapt to such events.  For example, if a pending dock strike might hit the industry hard, the CIO might want to partner with Supply Chain stakeholders to develop scenarios that help purchasing to forecast how much inventory needs to be stockpiled in order to weather the strike.



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