A colleague recently shared an intriguing article from Information Week, "Global CIO: Suicide Strategy for CIOs: Aligning IT With The Business" by Bob Evans. The gist of the article is that (ideally) IT is an integral part of the business and therefore alignment with “the business” is superfluous: IT should be aligning itself with customers. At first glance, the article may seem to be advocating that IT work directly with customers and not worry about other parts of the business.
But what the author’s really saying is that IT needs to intertwine with the business and then together the business and IT will align with customer and market need: “IT teams [that] are intertwined with the business and are accelerating and enhancing connections with customers instead of sitting back and waiting to be told by someone else what's happening out in the world and what, in turn, the IT organization's reactive response should be…”
A concept missing from the article is how applications are developed and deployed (details, details). In a truly intertwined model, responsibilities for developing and maintaining applications begin to change as IT focuses on innovation and allows the business to take on more responsibility for business applications. As intertwining builds trust, IT can and must increasingly empower business users to directly author and maintain portions of applications.
One of the examples of technical leadership and business innovation is an insurance company that’s launched an online business where customers can customize their own policies. Business rule technology is often used for insurance product customization; it allows subject matter experts (like underwriters or actuaries) to directly author and maintain the underwriting logic that powers insurance policy process from underwriting and pricing to policy issuance, claims management and policy renewal. IT no longer has to spend its time making constant changes to business logic. They are free to focus on deep technology issues—and innovation.
So the story of this insurance company’s innovation isn’t just about IT aligning with the customer. It’s about IT intertwining itself with the subject matter experts and empowering them to take responsibility for key parts of the application development and maintenance process by owning the business logic they understand best. If credit scoring rules change, who is better suited to maintain this than the credit analysts? IT is then free to focus on the technical infrastructure that will support today’s online business and whatever the future may bring. By empowering “the business” to own the logic they understand best, the smart CIO makes applications more flexible and allows his team to focus on innovation.
Intertwine, Align, Empower, Innovate.