What is Business Alignment Really All About?
Business alignment is like motherhood and apple pie, no one will argue much against it. But for all the hand waving, questions remain. What are you aligning? How do you align?
Answers generally center on aligning IT with the business. But shouldn’t that be a given?! Methodologies recommend a great many touch points with individual users and good interpersonal relationships. But do those things ensure good business practices – or just good GUIs? And why just IT? Aren’t there other kinds of projects in the business too?
True business alignment results from engineering real business solutions for real business problems based on deliberate strategy (in a deliverable we call a Policy Charter). The approach should be exactly the same whether the business solution involves comprehensive automation, just partial automation – or none at all.
True business alignment is also something you can demonstrate quantitatively.
- How fully are business goals being achieved?
- What is the failure rate of business policies?
- How quickly can emerging risks and opportunities be spotted?
Tags: alignment, business alignment, KPIs, metrics, Policy Charter, strategy
Ronald G. Ross
Ron Ross, Principal and Co-Founder of Business Rules Solutions, LLC, is internationally acknowledged as the “father of business rules.” Recognizing early on the importance of independently managed business rules for business operations and architecture, he has pioneered innovative techniques and standards since the mid-1980s. He wrote the industry’s first book on business rules in 1994.