Alignment Business & It

Aligning Business
and IT in the
Enterprise

an

®

IT Management eBook

Contents…
Aligning Business and IT in the Enterprise

This content was adapted from Internet.com’s CIO Update Web site. Contributors: Dennis Drogseth,
Patty Azzarello, Jerome Oberlton, and Allen Bernard

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CIOs More Focused on Business than Ever

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Mastering the Art of IT/Business Alignment8

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It is Time to Think Beyond IT

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Leveraging the Right Resources for Alignment

Aligning Business and IT in the Enterprise

It is Time to Think Beyond IT
By Dennis Drogseth

M

ore than 10 years ago, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) consultants
assessed processes and technologies involved with monitoring and managing
manufacturing floors, utilities,transportation fleets, and
other “business infrastructures.” They came to the conclusion that great economies of scale could be achieved
by consolidating these requirements. In other words, by
leveraging IT capabilities for
monitoring, instrumentation, asset planning, security, service
management, automation, and
analytics, businesses could gain
new levels of operational efficiencies, minimize riskand more
proactively optimize to changing
market requirements. Back then,
EMA called this the “Global Corporate Control Center.”
At that time, in the late ‘90s,
monitoring was pretty basic
(well, even more basic than it is
today, at least), and process automation existed (when it existed
at all) in very narrow silos within
IT. Analytic capabilities were mostly rule-based event managementwith very little in the way of self-learning, selfadaptive heuristics. And when these later appeared, these
“advanced analytic” capabilities mostly didn’t work.
Attention to process and the disciplines that best practices
such as ITIL could provide were barely emerging. IT was
very much a kingdom set apart from the business — or no,
not even that, but rather a series of feudal kingdoms eachwith its own walls and each with its own opinions about
priorities and governance — when defined priorities and

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governance existed at all. The Web was certainly not Web
2.0 let alone SOA, and the notion of broad integration
technologies such as CMDB, configuration management
systems (CMS), IT process automation, and advanced discovery fundamentally didn’t exist.Then IT had the shock of its life. From 2000 to 2002 the
technology bubble imploded, leaving many technology companies adrift in a sea of
doubt and IT organizations fighting hard not to be outsourced.
And while that fight has been
renewed in the latest economic
crisis, most IT organizations have
learned a lot since then about
governance, visibility, compliance, accountability, and how tooptimize better with many of the
above-mentioned technologies.
Even more importantly, there is
something of a slow-burning po litical revolution within many IT
organizations leading to dialog
across organizational groups in a
creative, responsible, and gamechanging way that simply never
existed before. Of course there’s still a long way to go, but
the IT landscape is fundamentally shifting.Let’s revisit the premise of EMA’s old idea of the “Global
Corporate Control Center,” which suggests collapsing a
whole new set of “feudal kingdoms” into a more efficient,
more risk-free, more automated, and more accountable
fabric of people and technologies. One thing that should
become apparent just from reading the press is that companies in many industries are accelerating their questto
find new and more effective ways of working.

Aligning Business and IT in the Enterprise, an Internet.com IT Management eBook. © 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

Aligning Business and IT in the Enterprise

Some of these industries, such as healthcare, reflect a
more proactive effort as electronic information for storing and sharing patient records, enabling...