5 Steps to Successful Business-IT Alignment

What is business-IT alignment?

In a well-aligned organization, business and IT departments work collaboratively to leverage technology as an enabler for achieving business goals, driving innovation, enhancing operational efficiency, and gaining a competitive advantage. 

Business-IT alignment goes beyond mere technology implementation. It encompasses the alignment of processes, people, and systems to ensure that technology initiatives directly contribute to the organization's overall business outcomes. 

But alignment does not happen by accident. To drive successful change management that aligns your IT professionals and their business colleagues, CIOs, IT leaders, and business leaders have to address the challenges that impede this alignment. 

Next, let's delve into specific steps to align your business and IT professionals. 

How to achieve efficient business-IT alignment in 5 steps?

Step #1: Establish common goals for strategic alignment. 

First things first: to get the business-IT alignment right, you've got to set common goals that align with your overall business strategy.

Business professionals should take the lead in driving digital transformation initiatives, ensuring that technology initiatives are directly linked to business objectives. But IT professionals should collaborate on goal setting, making sure they mirror  the technological capabilities of your IT departments. This way, the goals are relevant to both teams.

Common goal alignment gives participants incentives to collaborate, aligns priorities, and lowers the communication gap between different stakeholders. 

So, how do you establish strategic alignment in practice beyond collaborating on common goals?

1. Make the common goals more objective by establishing metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This will lower the resistance to change and keep the workforce motivated by tracking the progress of their targets. 
2. Avoid building products and services in silos. Align business processes and IT initiatives with a common roadmap. A shared roadmap synchronizes processes and building activities across the two units and helps maintain alignment with every feature release and milestone. 

Step #2: Involve everyone in decision-making.

Business professionals traditionally call the shots when it comes to business decisions. While they're experts at understanding business needs, they often lack the know-how to best translate business challenges into business results. 

This is where IT professionals shine. When they have a seat at the decision-making table, IT specialists can recommend the optimal solutions to tackle business challenges.

For example, you can improve the customer experience in multiple ways:

• Personalize customer communication at every touchpoint at scale,
• Lower customer dissatisfaction and churn, or
• Build better business relationships with the Customer 360 view and other tools.

Each approach has technological trade-offs and complexities. Your IT professionals can help you pick the best solution for your business needs.

Step #3: Empower workers with the right tools.

One of the biggest challenges to business-IT alignment is the skills gap. Lack of technical knowledge among business stakeholders and limited business understanding among IT professionals can hinder alignment efforts.

The lack of business savviness is compensated by common goals and collaborative decision-making.

But how can you increase the know-how of your non-technical experts? How can they work alongside IT professionals to create products that delight the end users?

Education and talent development initiatives are one route, but they take time and it can be a while before you see concrete business results.

A better approach is to empower your non-technical with the right information systems and tools. For example, Keboola can be a big help here: 

1. Visual Flow Builders: These intuitive, drag-and-drop components allow business colleagues to develop end-to-end pipelines without any coding knowledge.
2. No-code features: With no-code transformations and similar features, non-technical experts can build data quality checks and prepare their own datasets to make better decisions by simply re-using canned transformations.
3. Data templates: These ready-to-go templates enable your business users to launch pre-made end-to-end workflows and products at the click of a button

Choose tools and solutions that include features designed to empower both your IT and business users to work together on solutions that your customers will love.

Step #4. Lower organizational change resistance

Lower the friction and resistance with the right change management approach:

1. Pick a low-hanging fruit. Pick a project that has clear business outcomes and requires low effort, yet can quickly showcase business results to everyone at the company. 
2. Start small and deliver fast. Create quick wins with a small team of champions that achieve business results on the low-hanging fruit project. These will inspire and validate your business-IT alignment initiatives in the eyes of the wider company.

Once you've established this successful practice, it's time to extend it throughout the organization and encourage other departments and professionals to join your initiative.

Step #5: Show the value of business-IT projects 

To win minds and hearts, it’s best to lead by example, not force. Demonstrating the value of your business-IT projects across the organization can inspire others to get on board with your initiative.

Consider using tools like Keboola’s Activity Center. The Activity Center centralizes the metadata and telemetry data into a single location, covering all your infrastructure and technical projects. It brings together all the data you need—from infrastructure costs to progress statuses and underused resources—giving you a comprehensive 360-degree view of everything happening inside your organization. All you need to do is pipe the data into a BI tool to visualize all the key metrics and KPIs reflecting your initiatives.

What are the benefits of a successful business-IT alignment?

There are 9 advantages to aligning your IT teams with your business units:

1. Enhanced operational efficiency. Business-IT alignment streamlines processes, eliminates redundancies, and optimizes workflows, leading to increased operational efficiency.
2. Increased agility and adaptability. Aligned organizations can quickly respond to changing market dynamics, emerging trends, and customer demands, enabling them to stay competitive and seize new opportunities.
3. Enhanced customer experience. Business-IT alignment allows organizations to leverage technology to deliver personalized and seamless customer experiences, leading to improved satisfaction and loyalty.
4. Accelerated innovation. Alignment fosters a culture of innovation by facilitating collaboration between business and IT, enabling the rapid development and deployment of innovative solutions.
5. Cost optimization. Aligning business and IT helps optimize resource allocation, identify cost-saving opportunities, and eliminate redundant systems and work, leading to cost efficiencies. Check this step-by-step guide to lowering operational costs and start optimizing costs today.
6. Effective risk management. Alignment enhances risk management capabilities by integrating IT security, compliance, and governance practices into the business strategy. This mitigates potential risks and ensures data integrity.
7. Increased business value. Successful alignment maximizes the value derived from technology investments, enabling organizations to achieve their strategic objectives and deliver tangible business outcomes.
8. Improved competitive advantage. Business-IT alignment enables organizations to differentiate themselves in the market by leveraging technology strategically, positioning them ahead of competitors.
9. Sustainable growth and adaptability. Alignment sets the foundation for long-term growth and adaptability, allowing organizations to navigate disruptive forces, embrace digital transformation, and seize future opportunities.

Case study: Successful business-IT alignment increases the return on investment

Olfin Car is a leading seller of new and used cars in the Czech Republic with additional services in the field of financing, authorized car service, and insurance.

They were challenged with aligning their IT workforce with their marketing and sales departments to achieve faster growth.

By relying on Keboola to automate IT heavy lifting, Olfin Cars was able to:

• Collect and centralize data across their internal systems, 3rd party providers, and competitors.
• Build a precision advertising system to determine effective advertising options (precise bidding, market knowledge, targeted messaging, competitive pricing analyses, etc.).
• Monitor the competition for market changes.
• Implement dynamic pricing based on accumulated data.
• Manage and align the IT and business employees with common KPIs.

The result? Olfin Cars increased its sales by 760%.

Unfortunately, advantages are not always easily accessible. Prepare yourself for the challenges ahead, so you can lower the friction of change management. 

What are the challenges for aligning business and information technology?

Five main challenges hinder business-IT alignment in modern digital businesses:

1. Differing priorities. Business units and IT departments often have different priorities and objectives. Bridging the gap and aligning these priorities can be challenging, as each group may focus on different outcomes and strategies.
2. Lack of strategic planning. Without a clear strategic plan that aligns business goals and IT strategies, organizations may struggle to prioritize initiatives and allocate resources effectively.
3. Communication gap. Effective communication between business and IT stakeholders is essential for alignment. However, a lack of clear communication channels and understanding between these two groups can hinder the alignment process.
4. Skillset gaps. Bridging the skill set gaps between business and IT professionals is crucial for effective alignment. Lack of technical knowledge among business stakeholders and limited business understanding among IT professionals can hinder alignment efforts.
5. Resistance to change. Resistance to change can be a significant barrier to business IT alignment. Individuals within the organization may resist adopting new technologies or adjusting processes, hindering progress toward alignment.

IT leaders and business leaders who successfully bridge these challenges unlock many benefits for their organizations.

You can solve these challenges faster and get ahead of your competition with Keboola - a solution that accelerates your business-IT alignment.

Contact Keboola to turn business-IT alignment best practices into reality

Business and IT alignment never happen by accident. Communication and culture are important levers for your business transformation, but having the right tools that support and streamline your initiatives can accelerate your path to success.

Keboola offers all the tools in a single end-to-end data platform that helps you automate all your data operations and align IT initiatives with business processes.

As an awarded leader in this space, we have helped companies large and small transform their businesses by aligning IT and business units into a cohesive business growth engine:

• Olfin Cars increased its sales by 760%.
• Harri built an AI platform from scratch in 3 months. 
• Mall Group launched 400 new business use cases in a year.

Curious how much faster you could grow with Keboola? 

Give us a call and let’s discuss how to build the roadmap to successfully align your business and IT operations.