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ICT<br />
Malta Business Review<br />
Why IT-business Alignment Still Fails<br />
By Minda Zetlin<br />
Contributing Writer, CIO<br />
With the push for digital transformation, relations between business and IT seemed<br />
to be improving, then they took a left turn. Here’s what’s worth add<strong>res</strong>sing to<br />
improve alignment in your organization.<br />
Do your company’s<br />
IT leaders and top<br />
business executives<br />
have the same<br />
understanding of<br />
IT’s role within the<br />
organization?<br />
Back in 2012, <strong>res</strong>earchers at Capgemini<br />
asked this question of more than 1,300<br />
senior executives. Sixty-five percent of them<br />
answered yes.<br />
Perhaps a number closer to 100 percent<br />
would have been ideal, but the fact that<br />
nearly two thirds of companies surveyed<br />
believed business and IT were on the same<br />
page was very good news. It rep<strong>res</strong>ented<br />
enormous and hard-won prog<strong>res</strong>s from the<br />
bad old days when business executives saw<br />
technology professionals as pointy-headed<br />
geeks, and technology professionals saw<br />
business executives as soulless and moneyobsessed.<br />
In the past six years, though, alignment<br />
between business and IT has gotten much,<br />
much worse. Asked that same question this<br />
year, only 37 percent of executives thought<br />
business and IT leaders agreed on IT’s<br />
role, according to a newly released study<br />
by Capgemini. And that’s not all. Only 35<br />
percent of <strong>res</strong>pondents think IT and business<br />
executives agree on how technology can<br />
increase productivity, down from 59 percent<br />
in 2012. Just 36 percent think IT and business<br />
leaders have the same view of IT investment<br />
priorities, down from 53 percent six years<br />
ago.<br />
This decline in business-IT alignment<br />
happened in an era when IT leaders <strong>final</strong>ly<br />
started getting the “seat at the table” they’d<br />
always wanted. Whether or not business<br />
leaders believe that “every company is a<br />
software company,” they all recognize the<br />
game-changing power of technology across<br />
all industries — and they’re exp<strong>res</strong>sing<br />
that recognition with cash. IDC forecasts<br />
that total worldwide spending on digital<br />
transformation technologies will exceed<br />
$1.3 trillion in 2018. <strong>MBR</strong><br />
Creditline: CIO<br />
Photo credit: Getty Images<br />
www.maltabusinessreview.net<br />
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