Alignment: are you hitting the right targets?

     Welcome  to

IT does make a difference, among rival firms.

Nicholas Carr said, "IT doesn't matter," but consider this: Anybody with money can buy a guitar like Segovia's, but few can can play it like he does. The same is true with technology: anyone can buy it, but it's what you do with it that counts.

Doing the right things with IT means aligning IT capabilities closely with actual business goals. Well-aligned organizations make better profit margins than their industry rivals. The payoff is huge: IT-business alignment accounts for over half the variation in profit margins among companies in the same industries. So companies who do the right things with IT make more money than their rivals.

We have proven and tested methods to help you improve your IT-business alignment. We give you a complete catalog of current business goals across the enterprise. We provide metrics on how well IT supports them, and data on how the project portfolio can be changed to improve alignment.

Your first assessment can be ready in eight to ten weeks. Minimal work is required from your IT staff. And you can track your progress over time because all our measures can be repeated. (See FAQ's)

We have been doing this for medium-to-large organizations in both private and public sectors for over fifteen years, and now have more than 200 organizations in our database.

Tools for Alignment and Portfolio Management

Because business goals change often, maintaining alignment is an ongoing process. We give you a starting point and yearly updates, but you need to act on the data to align better. This means identifying new projects that will help business goal achievement, and dumping old projects that are no longer viewed as contributing. With precise data on what the goals are, these decisions are better than guesswork or endless negotiations. Both business and IT managers should participate in these portfolio management decisions. No matter what other criteria are used (ROI, Cost, Risk, etc) whether or not a project supports a top business goal should be a go- no-go gating factor.

The Outsourcing Challenge

Outsourcing parts of IT to control costs makes it harder to maintain good IT alignment with business goals. Efficiency may improve, but business effectiveness may falter. Outsourcing contracts typically run to five years and more, but in most firms business goals change a lot in a year. The deal with the outsourcer(s) must keep pace. We help you monitor these changes so you can revise your deal before IT runs off the tracks and hurts business effectiveness. Some of our clients have measured with us before and periodically after outsourcing.