Opinion: It is Time for a New Paradigm Shift in Business-IT Alignment

In his latest post Fred Cummins, an EDS Fellow and author of the book Building the Agile Enterprise with SOA, BPM and MBM, argues that it is time for a paradigm shift in our quest for Business-IT alignment. He quotes:

Brian Dooley in his 2008 Cutter Consortium article entitled "Business-IT Alignment (Again)" [...] sees this as a problem of processes and communications [and] questions whether the term "alignment" is still relevant.

In "Business/IT Alignment ‘Is Dead'-What's Next?" Bob Evans proposes that IT cannot bring significant business and customer value without a new approach, because "Alignment Is Dead".

Peter Hinssen [asserts] in Business/IT Fusion: How to Move Beyond Alignment and Transform IT in Your Organization, [...] that it is time to rethink IT [and suggests] what is needed is a fusion of business and IT-a "blending of IT with the business to focus on technology-enabled innovation".

Tom Lodahl and Kay Redditt in their article, "Business/IT Alignment Redux", claim that the change should be a diffusion in which IT people are scattered throughout the business organization and blend into the organizations they support.

While he agrees that:

it is time for a paradigm shift and [while] alignment does not capture the essence of the needed change, [...] neither do processes, fusion nor diffusion.

He sees that:

The fundamental problem is that business and IT people have different perspectives, and the enterprise needs a balance between business and IT perspectives. Art Jahnke, in his 2004 article entitled, "Sound Off - Why is Business-IT Alignment So Difficult?", sees business executives making IT decisions with little knowledge of IT, while their IT organizations are technology-driven and don't understand the needs of the business. This difference of perspective cannot be resolved with a discipline or formal negotiation, it requires collaboration.

Fred argues that:

Agile development methods are an attempt to re-introduce flexibility and collaboration, but agile methods do not scale to large projects-they work for small, multidisciplinary teams.

The needed paradigm shift should be based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). As an approach to design of the business, SOA provides a basis for new relationships between business and IT. These relationships support collaboration in a number of well-defined contexts, so small teams of business and IT people can collaborate to address specific needs of the business.

Fred defines a services as:

A service unit is an organizational unit that manages a distinct capability (potentially people, resources, facilities, applications and intellectual capital), and applies that capability in the form of services that meet the needs of external customers or other units within the enterprise. The requirements-the scope and interface-of each service unit are defined such that the service unit is a relatively stable enterprise component that can be engaged to apply its capability in multiple contexts, typically to meet the needs of different lines of business.

He argues that along the lines of Services:

IT architects [can] collaborate with the business architects to design the structure of the business with an understanding of how information technology can be exploited to optimize the enterprise design. Together, they can assess the potential business value of the application of new technology to individual service units, and they can provide input to management decisions regarding technology investments.

In addition, he sees that IT is also responsible for:

• Managing technical resources to optimize the use of information technology for the enterprise as a whole. IT is responsible for optimization of the shared technical infrastructure.
• Supporting enterprise intelligence-making information accessible regarding the enterprise and it's ecosystem. This involves the capture, integration and aggregation of data from various sources to provide a timely and consistent view of the state of the enterprise as well as relevant events and trends.

He concludes that:

The SOA paradigm shift enables IT to take responsibility for optimization of technical resources at an enterprise level, while it enables localized innovation and collaboration in the implementation and automation of service units.

Did your SOA initiative support enhanced collaboration between the business and your IT organization? How was your SOA Governance organization involved in enabling this collaboration?