Tag: Strategic IT Planning

Business-IT alignment is a strategy that prioritizes objectives around reducing costs, improving agility, and increasing the return on IT investment.

Although business and IT teams have vastly different roles and purposes, they ultimately share one underlying objective: to offer a seamless and satisfying customer experience that has a positive impact on business outcomes.  

Traditionally, business professionals and IT departments operated in their functional silos, each dedicated to their area of focus. However, there has been a philosophical shift towards improving the collaboration between teams so that an enterprise’s business needs and goals can be anticipated and considered throughout the decision-making process. One DevOps technique demonstrated the many benefits associated with breaking these silos down, and its success has encouraged organizations to rethink the more traditional, compartmentalized approach in favor of improving communication and participation across departments.

The divide between IT and business is so culturally evident that it reads like a punchline to a workplace joke. Today, companies recognize the need to align IT and business: A recent *Gartner report predicts that half of the organizations worldwide will achieve increased IT-business collaboration by 2022. 

In this article, we’ll look at IT-business alignment, including problems when IT and business units aren’t aligned, benefits of alignment, and even best practices and strategies to take your alignment from an idea into action.

What do you think are the problems with the current state?

Most companies can agree that business and IT aren’t working as closely as possible to optimize their service and product delivery. The oft-cited reason? Traditional business units function very differently from technology. Other reasons: Stereotypes perpetuate misconceptions about how business sees IT and vice versa. Non-IT personnel thinks IT is too technical to understand, and they might fail to recognize that IT participates in core revenue-generating activities like sales, marketing, customer service, etc.

Though these stereotypes are changing in the 21st century, different disciplines do have inherently different cultures, objectives, incentives, languages, and skillsets. It’s how writing makes sense to some people, and others are more comfortable working with numbers and spreadsheets.

Despite the elevation of roles like CTOs and CIOs, tech leadership continues to report significant struggles when attempting to collaborate with business units. You might easily recognize a problematic IT-business relationship. Indicators that these differences are hurting your company often show up in problems like:

Every organization today must become a technology business, no matter what product or service you offer. This shift is inevitable, and with it comes the concept of IT-business alignment: that IT enables business and business drives IT efforts. Neither is less necessary; both are revenue-generating.

Benefits of aligning IT and business

Aligning IT and business results in countless benefits:

All these benefits result in top customer experiences, boosting your bottom line.

(Source: comptia.org)

Achieving IT-business alignment: best practices

Talking about alignment and achieving it are two separate things. Achieving true IT-business alignment is difficult primarily because it’s cultural. Culture changes might seem easy—hang up value-based posters, encourage department meet-and-greets—but those efforts rarely succeed.

Instead, achieving alignment requires strategy. And that strategy should be an iterative process: define one change, put it in place, watch it perform, and decide whether to tweak it. Consider the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle to implementing change.

To align IT and business, consider these best practices:

Change your thinking, change your doing. Most companies are siloed, so marketing experts rarely work with IT, and both teams rarely see how sales talks with customers. Instead, think of all your business units, including tech, in a continuous, strategic loop. Changing your thinking means teams begin to understand other teams, so they can function better: increasing efficiency, reducing risk.

View IT as an instrument for business transformation. If you’re asking how IT can support other business units like sales, product development, and marketing, you’re still following a siloed approach. Instead, add IT to those business units: each one is equally capable of transforming the business. Integrate teams to combine business units. Explore revenue streams that IT can directly impact.

Make the customer experience the #1 factor. Every single business unit, person, and the task should be working to improve the customer experience. Aligning everyone under common language and goals that directly support the customer makes it easier to break down traditional discipline silos. Sales talk directly to customers, of course, but so do marketers and product developers. Make sure your tech teams also focus directly on the customer.

Use a single language. Every industry and every company have its lingo. While business units understand other BUs and tech-minded personnel get other tech minds, separate languages tend to keep them separate. Help demystify what every team does: start by standardizing your company language across all teams.

Be equally transparent to all departments. Continuing the theme of unnecessary mysteries, executive and management decisions should be transparent (as much as possible). What are good investments the company is making? What investments panned out poorly? A good way to know if one or several teams don’t have this clarity is to see whether they agree with or understand a recent managerial or executive decision. If it seems like the CTO simply trusted his gut or your manager played favorites, that’s a big clue that you’re not being as transparent as your staff needs.

Rotate IT and business employees to encourage understanding. A simple in-house mentorship program supports IT and business employees in bridging the IT-business gap. Put a salesperson in with a dev team and sit as a help desk agent with the marketing team for a few weeks—the cross-cultural learning will result in better understanding that will close the gap. Those inter-discipline relationships also broaden thinking, resulting in innovation.

Promote a vibrant, inclusive culture. Company culture isn’t the single key to achieving alignment, but it’s one component. Stop holding sales-only happy hours or ordering late-night pizza parties for only the help desk. Instead, promote inter-department exchange formally and informally. Schedule conversational events and speaking series. Use company money to encourage cross-functional meetings. Do this on a 1:1 level, buying lunch or coffee when an IT person and a business professional go out together or offer extra budget dollars to do this on a team level.

Understand change in humans. Take some time to learn how humans accept change and then look at change management processes that might inform what works for people—and what doesn’t.

Create an alignment plan. Before embarking ad-hoc on your alignment journey, consider some frameworks for turning your alignment efforts into an actionable strategy:

The Zachman Framework shows how one complex idea can be translated to different people for different purposes.

Organizational Change Management (OCM) offers a way to re-organize your IT depending on your purpose—which, in our case, is to better align IT and business.

I hope the above discussion has emphasized the benefits of IT and business alignment for every aspect. Now it’s time to bring business leaders and IT teams together under a single platform so that organizations can fine-tune their applications to meet target audience needs. Still, now those are trapped under business problems and trying to find out the perfect IT solutions for tech challenges software services company InovarTech is ready to extend the hand of collaboration to help them. Reach out to us for the digital transformation and application development strategy and ensure your success in the global competitive market. 

Over the last few years, the telecom industry has witnessed a heavy decline in revenue in core areas like voice and text messaging along with severe competition from Over-The-Top Service providers. Today the telecom industry is poised to undergo Digital Transformation due to the swift emergence of IoT and 5G. By making the services customer-centric, improving efficiency, and adding high-value margins, they can move away from traditional services. Just as cloud computing has changed the world of data, it is now changing the way the telecom industry operates. Many organizations have started adopting cloud-hosted solutions to streamline data delivery and utilize a single supplier for voice & data services.  

Telecom is a people-intensive industry, with a seasoned workforce that includes teams in offices, on trucks, and in retail storefronts. Being forced to work from home due to the ongoing pandemic has impacted their productivity and increased security and infrastructure risks for customers. Technology has transformed almost every sector across the globe and the telecommunications industry is no exception to it.  

Here are a few solutions that we feel can cause a dramatic change in the telecom industry: 

  1. 5G Network – The Network of Today and Tomorrow 

There are billions of internet users around the globe and most of them prefer smartphones as their primary internet access point. With smartphones now helping users manage important tasks in their lives, consumers look for high capacity networks that promise faster access to applications and richer services. Telecom giants, with the help of various technologists, have already started rolling out their 5G to a multitude of industries such as healthcare, automobile, and education. This expansion of telecom into all sectors by automating processes for online customers is what can bring back the telecom industry to its true potential.  

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  1. Managing Big Data 

IoT enables telecom companies to acquire an enormous amount of data with the help of various sensors in mobile devices and apps. With the help of tech giants, companies can ensure that their network can move this data efficiently and continue to support new technologies. The data collected helps to generate crucial business insights and understand customer usage patterns which can ultimately be used to improve customer service and evaluate new products to optimize the network.  

  1. Cloud adoption to unlock revenue stream 

Most telecom providers rely on a large computing infrastructure to deliver a diverse set of applications, manage data, and bill services. Migrating to the cloud reduces internal computing resource needs as well as internal costs while increasing revenue streams. The pay-per-use service model helps telecoms to introduce new services, reduce the cost of the service, and work more effectively as per the market demands. By adopting cloud technology, telecom industries can switch important business functions to the cloud and benefit from its efficiency.  

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  1. Cybersecurity 

The telecom sector is one of the most vulnerable sectors when it comes to cybersecurity. With telecom companies having a large customer base, there are abundant opportunities for malicious attacks to gain unauthorized access to their data. The consequences of infrastructure under attack could potentially affect a whole country and its government agencies. Thus, by adopting a holistic approach, telecom providers are able to detect threats, take up prevention measures, and support resilience when attacked.  

  1. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) 

The telecom industry has one of the highest adoption rates for RPA technology. It offers high levels of scalability and agility as it takes over the repetitive and rule-based tasks or processes. This enables companies with the right tools to easily manage back-office work such as maintaining data integrity and security, employee salaries, marketing, and advertising, thus giving employees time to work on crucial tasks and develop deeper customer relationships.  

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  1. ChatBots to manage customer base 

As the telecom industry is now slowly based heavily on technological advances, many are already using AI technology such as virtual assistants, chatbots, and tools to improve customer experience and satisfaction. These solutions provide an unmatched ability to process and analyze an enormous amount of big data that provides valuable insights to improve the quality of service and increase revenue.  

The telecommunications industry has been relaying messages between individuals and businesses for over 2 centuries – even during crises. Stress tested for resilience during the past 200 years, this industry is sure to evolve and emerge even more prepared for the decades ahead. There are a lot of new trends in this growing world of the telecom industry, but they all rely on the fundamentals of technology as a niche. By being able to provide reliable technology with a focus on the clients, one may be able to expand exponentially in the future.