In years gone by, it’s fair to say that the story of the relationship between IT and the business has been one of misunderstandings, misconceptions and mistrust. If it was a book, it would probably be titled something like Men are from Mars, Geeks are from Alpha Centauri.
But in today’s increasingly competitive economic landscape, CIOs are now seen as key enablers of business expansion. And as such, the relationship between technology specialists and their business equivalents has to be managed better than it has been in the past – so that IT understands what the business needs, and the business appreciates what IT can do to improve performance.
John Parkinson is Senior Vice President and the head of the Global Program Office at Axis Capital. Speaking at the most recent CIO Summit US, he outlined his organization’s approach to the thorny issue of IT-business alignment: using a program management team that sits between IT and the business in order to educate business users to make better decisions around how technology can help them in their jobs.
He said:
“It’s about implanting technology-savvy, business-focused people into the operating side of the business, so there are voices they trust that they interact with every day.
"t’s part listening to what users want to achieve from a business perspective, and then translating that into longer-term architectural and platform decisions that IT can make behind the scenes.”
Parkinson sees this as an important change from how things were done in the past, where IT and operations were seen as reactive rather than proactive.
He said:
“By finding out more about the longer-term implications of what the business wants to do, we can be better custodians of the capital that’s entrusted to us to build the technology.”
The key challenge inherent in such an approach, he says, is in managing the budget.
Parkinson says:
“It’s good discipline in a financial sense to say, okay, we start again every January with a new budget.
"However, it gets more and more difficult to work in one-year chunks as you make longer-term commitments to an uninterrupted technology capability. That’s why, for the first time, we’re moving to a three-year plan in order to get a slightly longer planning horizon.”
And with longer-term technology programs largely taken care of, Parkinson and his team are now able to spend more time looking at ways to add value to the business: namely, by fostering innovation.
Parkinson explains:
"We put together a grass roots innovation program where we reached out to people in the organization and asked for their ideas. We then put those ideas through a formal review process, and put the best ones into what we call a ‘sandbox’.”
