In this podcast episode, we will focus on the importance of the partnership between IT and business and why this partnership is quite critical for continued innovation within an organization. Although the industry has been discussing the need and importance of this partnership for a few decades now, the reality is that it continues to be a hurdle in many organizations and this in turn is impacting the pace of innovation and delivery of business outcomes.

In this digital age particularly, this partnership between IT and the Line of Businesses of organizations is even more crucial as businesses are focusing to deliver innovative and technologically advanced digital applications and services to the market at a much rapid pace than ever efore. These applications are needed in the area of improving customer experience, achieving operational excellence, improved decision making and other areas.

In this context, we can look at one study that was sponsored by Oracle with Harvard Business Review in which they surveyed business and IT departments of around 270 organizations. As a result of this study they found the criticality of this partnership and also why it is so crucial for organizations to improve their overall agility, pace and quality of innovation.

The results from this study showed the following:

  1. When organizations were asked about the number one challenge in getting innovative applications to the market, they cited lack of integration and partnership between IT and business. Other challenges that were cited included lack of IT resources, project budget, business units working in silos, and others.
  2. Only Less than 50% of the organizations and their businesses stated that IT was either responsive or somewhat responsive to the needs of the organization. So, we see that a large percentage of organizations still see a need to improve IT’s responsiveness to the business requirements.
  3. When asked about the role of an organization’s LOBs in the decision making process related to technology initiatives, almost 60% stated that they see a constant increase in the LOB’s role in such decision making. So, this highlights the importance of increasing the effectiveness of partnership between IT and LOBs.
  4. According to the study, 64 percent said that leadership’s involvement was very or extremely important in achieving software innovation. So, while in general the partnership between IT and business was seen as important, the need for the leaderships of the two sides to stay engaged was considered crucial as well.
  5. Another important finding was that for those companies where LOBs turned to external help to develop enterprise applications, their preference would have been to work with internal IT if IT had enough resources and there was less bureaucracy. But for cases where they saw dealing with IT as more challenging, they would turn to contracting external help.

In general, this lack of partnership between IT and business is the root cause behind the lack of alignment between IT and business that ends up being an impediment to successful strategy execution and business innovation. As we mentioned earlier, this results in LOBs turning to external consultants to get IT help when they see dealing with internal IT as more of a challenge. This also results in what is known as Shadow IT, where LOBs work with external cloud service providers to get IT services rather than turning to internal IT to request those services. Also, the lifecycle from product or service ideation to delivery becomes much longer due to the internal organizational silos and hurdles.

In conclusion, the following are some of the steps that organizations can take to increase collaboration between themselves.

  1. First is that CIOs need to take a leadership role in increasing the effectiveness of the partnership between business and IT. The CIOs need to work more closely with the leadership of the LOBs and they to find ways to increase the collaboration and the day to day involvement of the LOB users with IT in delivering applications internally to the organization or to the external market.
  2. The LOBs should become more proactive in communicating the business requirements to IT and to keep that pressure on IT in asking for services. This will keep IT engaged to improve the quality of their services that they provide to the business.
  3. Both IT and LOB leadership should work to bring down organizational silos and bureaucracy that discourages the two sides working with each other. One way to do this is to adopt Agile like practices where business and IT work as one team in delivering products and services.
  4. DevOps practices within IT should also be utilized as much as possible to smooth the delivery to production and to reduce introducing errors in production.
  5. Finally, CIOs also need to work internally to make IT less complex to enable innovation at a much faster pace. One way complexity can be reduced is to take an Enterprise Architecture approach and get a holistic view of the state of the enterprise’s business, its systems, data, and the business requirements driving the business and to look for ways to simplify IT to enable faster innovation.

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