OraNA :: Oracle News Aggregator

Opening up all cliches on Business and IT alignment. Yesterday, I had a discussion on how IT really could solve business problems. One of the statements that came by was that we simply needed to listen to the business in order to understand what IT has to do. This is, in my opinion, a bit too simplistic.

In the past few years we learned that IT and Business aren’t two different parts of an enterprise. Business processes are not just supported by Information Technology, but IT became part of the workflow of most organizations. Therefore the ‘you ask, we deliver’ mentality is not effective anymore. And therefore Business and IT ‘alignment’ is not a goal anymore. We need to entangle, fuse and combine.

Alignment still gives us the thought that Business and IT are two completely different things. This is no longer the case. IT became part of the Business. And only when this principle is understood, IT can become a driving force within (and not behind) any organization. As discussed in previous posts, this is the new vision of the CTO.

New technologies like BPM, SOA and other middleware solutions are based on this principle. But not always implemented. When integration of different ‘silos’ in organizations becomes pure technical, success is a guess. Determining the success factors for the entire organization (both for the Business as well as IT) is critical.

What do you think? And can you give me an example of projects in the IT domain where the success factor is a lottery?