Tech and business - Never the twain shall part

Does your organization treat IT/Tech initiatives separate from business initiatives? Chances are your IT/Tech projects do not provide you with the value your business needs. Chances are also that your business initiatives focus on the short term and experience technical deterioration over time.

Assuming tech enables your business, tech and business goes hand in hand. They are not separate. Regardless of whether your initiatives originate within IT/Tech or within the business, understanding the benefit they (intend to) have on the organization is key to investing wisely. The key to understanding benefit is to align IT/Tech with strategic and/or operational themes for the organization. Also, benefits are long term as well as short term.

What happens if you do not align tech initiatives in terms of the organization's strategy

• Management does not understand why they should fund tech initiatives
• Tech people don't feel like they are being seen/understood - and lose trust in management
• Tech initiatives are neglected leading to side effects such as
  • Increasing tech debt,
  • Decrease in tech team productivity, with serious long term business consequences
  • Decrease in team morale, …
• Mistrust between non-tech management and tech team as they are perceived as slower over time (actually, tech teams WILL BE slower over time)

If you're in charge of IT/Tech, how should you align?

• Get to grips with the fact that you are not just in charge of IT/Tech, you're responsible for the success of your organization (assuming tech is part of value creation, that is)
• Figure out what the important strategies are for the company
• Spend time understanding the external forces/trends affecting the business - i.e. get the whole picture
• Create a tech vision that supports the future of your organization, not just the ”here and now”
• Create a gap analysis of current tech capability and the capability needed to meet customer and/or market expectation; now and in the future
• Make sure to understand the life cycle status of your tech stack. Describe (business) consequences of not following through on the tech stack life cycle
• Make sure to understand what the major impediments are to capturing the full value of tech. Create a plan for tackling them and communicate the plan.
• Stop separating IT and Business; they are just two aspects of the same thing.

How to execute

• In a perfect world, you will be handling your technology improvement strategy using a "boy scout strategy" - improving it a little every day/development cycle
• If you do not live in the perfect world, and your tech debt has grown too large, you probably need to set aside one or more separate teams to tackle the issues.
  • It is extremely important to create initiatives for this team that connect to your company strategy - and thus your alignment exercise comes in handy
  • You can also make use of an impediment board to visualize a prioritized list of impediments and then tackle them in the right order.
• Capture real benefits often! Don't wait.
• Communicate! And then communicate. Up, down and sideways to ensure everyone knows why you are doing what you are doing; and what benefits you capture from it. Often!

This works for me. Hope it is also helpful for you.

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