Business Technology Alignment - Pebbleage Swiss Suisse

Business Technology Alignment - To maximize business return on technology investments, organizations must align IT decisions with strategic business goals. This process is one of the main IT Departments goals and is called “Business / IT Alignment”.

IT Alignment Framework

Roadmap the pathway from "AS IS" to "TO BE"

To align IT and Business, business priorities must be captured.
	Based on “AS IS” Business and IT environment and business priorities, IT management can determine the “TO BE” situation and the gap between “AS IS” and “TO BE”.

	To fill the gap, IT Management defines Roadmaps, prioritizes IT Investments and plans IT Project.

This analysis is based on:

	The capture of “AS IS” Business and IT environment

	The possibility to see the dependencies between processes and system

	The standardization of IT Architecture through the creation of “best practice” combinations of applications and hardware to achieve a business case

	The communication improvement between Business and IT

Enterprise Architecture Tools capabilities

Know the dependencies between processes and systems

Enterprise Architecture tools can enable manager to make the right decisions by understanding which applications, hardware or databases support business processes. It can help to know the business impacts of changing IT and similarly, to know how IT should react to changes in the business.
With a clear view of the relationships between the business processes and the IT environment, IT and business professionals can truly collaborate to provide better solutions to meet the needs of the business.

Define corporate standards to speed up Business needs satisfaction

IT teams can establish, publish and reuse “best practice” IT standards to react to change faster and improve IT services quality.

Communicate through the enterprise

EA tools facilitate communication between Business and IT departments through diagrams, documentation and web site generation.

Roadmap to align applications and technologies with
business and regulatory requirements

Model "AS IS" Business and IT situation

	Model into the same repository business and IT components

	Show the relationship between both components

Model "TO BE" Business and IT situation

	Capture business vision and requirements

	Determine IT vision

ROADMAP from "AS IS" to "TO BE"

	Prioritize IT initiatives according to business vision

	Prioritize, coordinate, schedule IT projects


IT controls need to be considered at 2 levels:

	Controls over the IT environment (General Controls : security, program change …)

	Controls over individual applications (Application Controls : embedded software program or routine to process transactions)


Assessing the controls efficiency:

	Periodic evaluation of controls

	Implementation of improvement recommendation

Monitor IT Alignment

By analyzing schedules and impact of IT and business programs, CIOs can ensure IT programs are aligned to support changes in the organization.