What We Do

Our Services

Business IT Alignment

We assist our clients to achieve IT alignment by implementing a set of well-planned process improvement programs that systematically address obstacles and go beyond executive level discussion to penetrate the entire IT organization and its culture.

We utilize a "IT/Business Alignment Cycle"method, which introduces a simple framework that an IT organization can adopt to manage a broad range of activities. The four phases of the cycle are: plan, model, manage, and measure.

Utilizing this cycle promotes organization-wide shared expectations between business and IT executives and managers, and helps to define a common framework for a range of activities that collectively serve to align IT and business objectives. The cycle also identifies best practices and common processes within and between IT functional groups to make IT/business alignment sustainable and scalable.

Plan: Translates business objectives into measurable IT services. The plan phase helps close the gap between what business managers need and expect and what IT delivers. IT executives in poorly aligned organizations are still trying to explain technology issues to their business peers and have not made the change to understanding business issues and communicating with business managers on their terms.

IT must establish continuing dialog to clarify business needs in business terms. Without this, IT may not be able to determine which services to offer or how to effectively allocate resources to maximize business value. Additionally, when business requirements change, IT needs to adapt and modify the service offering and resources appropriately.

IT should utilize a disciplined service level management process that will lead to agreement on specific services and service levels required to support business objectives. IT management can then transform the service definitions and service levels agreements into underlying rules and priorities that empower and guide IT resources.

Model: The model phase identifies resources needed to deliver IT services at committed service levels. This phase involves mapping IT assets, processes, and resources back to IT services, then prioritizing and planning resources that support those business critical services.

The bottom line in measuring the success of alignment is the extent that IT is working on the things business executives care about. That means IT must have processes in place for prioritizing projects, tasks, and support.

IT needs a service impact model and a centralized configuration and asset management repository to link the infrastructure components back to specific IT services to successfully prioritize resources. This combination is critical if IT is to effectively plan, prioritize, and deliver services at the agreed service levels while also holding or even reducing costs.

Manage: The manage phase enables the IT to deliver promised levels of service. IT can ensure the organization meets expectations by providing a single point of contact for business users to submit all service requests, and by prioritizing those requests based on pre-defined business priorities.

It is difficult to manage resources to meet agreed service levels without a single point of service request. Without a method for effectively managing IT infrastructure and all changes, IT faces the risk of causing failures.

To ensure the effectiveness of the service desk, the IT staff needs to provide:

• A method for prioritizing service requests based on business impact.
• A disciplined change management process to minimize the risk of negatively affecting service level commitments.
• An IT event management system to monitor and manage components that support business critical services.
• The underlying operational metrics that enable service delivery at promised levels, as well as the means for measuring and tracking the progress of service level commitments using these metrics.

Measure: The measure phase improves cross-organization visibility into operations and service level commitments.

Traditional IT management tools operate in functional silos that confine data collection and operational metrics to focused areas of functionality. They typically relate more to technology than to business objectives.

Component-level metrics and measures are certainly important for ongoing service availability. However, to support real-time resource allocation decisions, these measures must be interpreted in a broader business context, including the relationship to business-critical services. Isolated functional groups can't get a holistic view of IT services that support business objectives without a business context for interpreting measures and metrics.