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If you’re a CTO or CIO, you understand the challenge of shifting IT from a supporting role within your organization to a core driver of business strategy. When IT is out of sync with the company’s central goals, all parts of the organization can suffer.
Common misalignments can be integrating CRM software that doesn’t effectively fulfill your sales and customer service needs, or internal confusion around workflow tools, both issues that lead to ineffectual processes and missed opportunities.
Aligning IT functions with essential business goals is key to building long-term resilience and success in a rapidly transforming digital environment. Strong business-IT alignment ensures that your IT strategy advances your organization’s growth.
How Business-IT Alignment Exemplifies the Value of Efficient IT
When companies shift their IT strategy from reactive to proactive, they push their businesses toward success. The more outdated systems and technologies become, the harder it can be for companies to adapt to modern digital environments, drive IT modernization, and maintain strong cybersecurity.
This has been particularly evident with the explosive growth of organizations integrating AI tools. According to a report released by NTT Data last year, only 51% of organizations have fully aligned their IT to their business strategy needs, demonstrating a clear gap in IT-business alignment frameworks.
Creating an IT strategy that advances your business strategy instead of holding it back can:
Enhance Productivity and Operational Efficiency
It’s easy for companies to end up with a mix of tools that once seemed helpful but now just create confusion, especially when no one remembers why they were added or how they’re supposed to be used.
By clearing out the clutter and simplifying processes, you can eliminate redundant tools, optimize performance, and increase productivity through a more streamlined IT environment.
Strengthen Stakeholder Trust
When you communicate how IT supports your core goals, stakeholders are more likely to trust that you’ll manage issues proactively. Transparency also increases support for major initiatives, including digital transformation projects, modernizing software, or implementing improved cybersecurity controls.
Improve Risk Management and Security Culture
Understanding how business goals can be disrupted by industry risks is essential for building a security-first culture. Aligning IT with business strategy promotes vigilance among team members and strengthens your organization’s ability to mitigate risks, prevent data breaches, and enhance overall cyber risk management.
Lower Costs and Optimize Resource Allocation
By connecting IT costs to business needs, you can better allocate your budget, eliminate unnecessary expenses, and justify strategic technology investments. This alignment helps reduce you to technical debt and clearly demonstrate the ROI of your IT program.
The Five Steps of an Effective Business-IT Alignment Strategy
Though we’ve distilled the process down to five steps, keep in mind that aligning your IT strategy to your business goals is an ongoing process. As your organization evolves, so should your technology roadmap and alignment strategy.
1) Develop Effective Communication Channels
Gone are the days when IT was just a support function. Your leadership team and IT department should meet regularly to communicate goals, challenges, and expectations. Implement structured communication frameworks and ensure IT is a driving factor in broader business strategy discussions.
2) Identify Business Drivers & Ideal IT Set Up
Identify the key drivers that make your business successful, along with the objectives you aim to achieve. This ensures that your IT strategy focuses on supporting the most important outcomes.
Create an ideal outline for how IT will support long-term objectives, whether through legacy system modernization, infrastructure improvements, stronger cybersecurity, or adopting new technologies such as automation and AI.
3) Evaluate Current Business-IT Relationship
Review your current organizational structure with regard to how IT impacts business outcomes. Evaluate how existing projects, tools, and systems support, or fail to support, your business goals.
Look for gaps such as outdated systems, overlapping software, or strained resources. Collect feedback across teams to gain a full picture of the improvements needed in your IT-business alignment framework.
4) Implement Strategic IT
Use your findings to develop strategic IT initiatives that bridge gaps and advance business goals. Prioritize initiatives that support the most critical outcomes.
This may include enhancing cybersecurity, implementing cloud migration plans, optimizing software integrations, or expanding security awareness training; whatever aligns best with your goals, resources, and industry requirements.
5) Measure KPIs and Adapt over Time
Aligning IT with business goals requires ongoing effort. Identify relevant KPIs such as project delivery timelines, cost savings, system uptime, or stakeholder satisfaction.
Regularly assess how your alignment strategy is performing and conduct annual or quarterly reviews to adapt your roadmap over time.
Challenges that Block IT-Business Alignment
Organizations face a number of challenges, both internal and external, when it comes to syncing their business and IT strategies, but these are the most common:
Communication Difficulties
When company execs and IT leaders don’t relate to one another, it’s nearly impossible to align strategies. It’s essential to bridge the gap between disciplines and identify a shared language and vision.
Redundant Software
With the rapid explosion of tools for sales, marketing, CRM, communications, project management and so on, companies often find themselves footing quite the bill for software tools that overlap in functionality and cause bloat.
Internal Resistance
Nothing slows process alignment like resistance from within. Teams can be unwilling to learn new processes, when they’ve become comfortable with the status quo. This is why it’s crucial to provide enough time for effective transition and invest in hands-on training that doesn’t overwhelm.
Outdated Legacy Systems
With the expansion and integration of cloud computing on a massive scale, organizations that have outdated hardware and software face a daunting prospect when it comes to modernizing their systems to catch up to the modern digital landscape. Phasing out and replacing outdated legacy tech can be complicated and expensive.
How BD Emerson Can Help
BD Emerson’s Technology team will guide you through the strategic implementation of technologies and tools that will modernize your systems and propel your organization forward.
No matter your company’s size, industry, or stage of cyber maturity, our experienced team will find solutions that align with your goals.
Our experts assess the maturity of your current tech and identify gaps before proposing a technology investment plan and building out an effective change management strategy for the implementation of new tools and processes.
We help organizations modernize outdated environments by applying industry best practices around testing, deployment, and legacy system replacement. Our team improves workflows, strengthens cybersecurity and risk management systems, and deploys DevOps frameworks for faster, more reliable software delivery.
BD Emerson provides cloud strategy and architecture solutions, including the implementation of tools like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Our cloud experts help you put security measures in place to ensure cloud protection while assisting your team in migrating applications, data, and workloads to the cloud.
We are well-versed in AI risk assessment and mitigation and prepared to help your organization navigate compliance requirements, contractual obligations, and industry regulations, while also developing an ethical AI framework.
BD Emerson consultants dig into the “why” behind your business and align it with a cutting-edge technology strategy designed to strengthen your digital capabilities and accelerate growth.
Key Takeaway – Your IT Program Should Be a Business Driver
Ultimately, effective business-IT alignment ensures that your technology ecosystem is intentionally designed to advance and not constrain your organization’s strategic objectives.
When communication is clear, systems are modernized, and redundant or legacy components are phased out, IT becomes a powerful enabler of performance, resilience, and security. This work requires continuous evaluation and iteration as business needs evolve, but the result is a more efficient, predictable, and future-ready operating environment.
Tired of Letting an Outdated IT Strategy Slow Down Your Business?
If your organization is ready to enhance its architecture and build a technology roadmap that truly supports long-term growth, BD Emerson’s team is here to guide you every step of the way. Schedule a call with us today!
