Faheem Ebrahim
27 May 2021
New technologies, regulatory changes, and changes to the political landscape all contribute significantly towards creating a dynamic business environment. In order for a business to be successful in a dynamic environment, they require quality IT policies, practices and procedures. However, these practices should support the businesses strategies and provide IT-enabled solutions to clients. Therefore the importance of business and IT alignment cannot be ignored.
What is business and IT alignment?
In order to understand business and IT alignment we first need to define it. Business and IT alignment prioritize integration in order to reduce business costs, increase profits and improve the efficiency of the entire organization. Similarly, all IT and business alignment methods should achieve a goal and increase return on investments.
The role of business analysists in alignment
Business analysts (BAs) are responsible for bridging the gap between IT and businesses. By using data analytics to assess processes and determine requirements, BAs can deliver data-driven recommendations and reports to executives and stakeholders. BAs engage with business leaders and users to understand how data-driven changes to process, products, services, software and hardware can improve efficiencies and add value. Similarly, they must articulate those ideas but also balance them against what’s technologically, financially and functionally reasonable. Depending on the role, you might work with data sets to improve products, hardware, tools, software, services or process.
The importance of business and IT alignment
The benefits of aligning IT and business are vast. For instance, benefits include reducing costs, increasing departmental collaboration, improved use of IT resources, improving relationships with customers and suppliers, as well as enabling the creation of new products and solutions to business problems. In other words, business-IT alignment allows a business to respond to environmental threats as well as opportunities much faster due to having direction as well as organisational flexibility.
However, if businesses fail to align with IT there may be some serious drawbacks such as:
- not being able to invest money wisely
- not putting the measures in place that are necessary to obtain funding
- being unable to gain business credibility and provide proactive services
- not being able to attract the right employees as well as retain employees
- not being able to accurately measure the contribution that IT has made towards the business/organization
How we can help you
At Integrove we believe every business is different and has different needs. Therefore you don’t need to face the drawbacks of not aligning business and IT. Let us help you with your business and IT alignments.