Everyone talks about getting IT aligned with business but what does it mean? How does one achieve the elusive alignment between business & IT? Spawned from HCL’s Solution Lab, the Business Aligned IT framework lets the CIO focus on quantifiable business benefits from traditional IT activities. Traditionally, linking business benefits to IT activities has been difficult to achieve.
 
This is so, because the traditional IT approaches at rationalization and consolidations have been discrete aimed at reducing IT costs, they often miss the big picture. The IT costs typically represent less than 5% of the operating costs. Secondly fragmented IT silos may achieve the IT objective and to that extent reduce errors and speed up transactions, but are sub optimal. What is required, however, is a business process focus instead of the narrow IT silos approach. Thirdly the complexity of the IT fabric supporting the business has burgeoned exponentially, owing to heterogeneous technologies, multi vendor environment and the need to support diverse end user communities. Lastly, the IT landscape at best is only partially known. Unless we know what to align we cannot align IT to business.

Under the current economic situation where the IT budgets are southbound, every IT initiative has to address a business imperative. A business aligned IT approach bridges the gap between IT services delivery and business process requirements by focusing on process cycle times. The efficiency of a business process is determined by its cycle time that in turn is determined by the availability and performance of the underlying business services.

In essence, Business Aligned IT is a collaborative approach with the customer to reduce business costs by continually tracking and analyzing real time metrics that improve business process cycle times.