Wading Through Approaches to Find True Business and IT Alignment

There are several technological methodologies, and just as many acronyms, that promise to improve business efficiency and enable growth. Business Process Management (BPM), which should not to be confused with Business Performance Management that utilizes balanced scorecards for executives, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and the newer Business Service Management (BSM). All of these approaches are regularly discussed, but not always understood or well executed. With each come particular areas of focus, strength and seeming ambiguity.
One thing is clear however, the business and IT alignment these methodologies promote can help companies prosper.

“Information technology is no longer simply a business tool; it has become the arbiter of business growth and sustainment,” says John Carlstrom, a segment marketing manager with HP. “With a broad perspective of how the IT pieces fit into and enable the business whole, companies can reap immense benefits by acting on information instead of waiting for, and debating over, reports.”

Business and IT alignment is certainly not a new goal, but measurably improving alignment and maximizing its impact across one department or the entire enterprise , is a tricky and confusing proposition. Too often this alignment occurs in silos, limiting its effectiveness.

Too few companies have full integration of their IT tools with a clear view of how they work together to achieve business goals. Yet that type of IT integration and view is possible for every organization, and frankly it’s what the business expects.

Carlstrom points to UC4 as a good example of a company that needed “real-time” operational dashboards to link IT infrastructure to business processes. Established in
1985, UC4 is one of the leading vendors in the enterprise job scheduling sector, offering solutions to optimize the efficiency of dynamic IT infrastructures with
its software product, UC4:global. Supported by its proprietary job scheduling software, the UC4 sales organization has achieved remarkable growth in recent years, and was reporting around the ‘classical’ IT sales processes to help identify and assess steps that require attention. However, to further optimize its sales management process, UC4 was looking for a real-time approach using role-specific views. Vincent Stüger, Senior Vice President, Product Development and Marketing at UC4, notes, “Drawing on our own UC4:global software, our sales process was very well structured to start with. However, what we didn’t have was full and instant visibility. We wanted to be able to continually monitor each stage of each sales process or the flow of processes in our sales pipeline from end to end, all the time, anytime – from lead generation all the way to deal closure. The idea was to track and minimize latency times and to identify bottlenecks up-front, before sales cycles were affected. After all, sales projects that get ‘stuck’ somewhere down the line may result in costly delays or even lost revenues,” says Vincent Stüger. HP demonstrated the benefits of the HP OpenView Business Service Management solution to UC4 in a real-life industrial scenario which included the allocation of a specific business value to each element in the business process, indicating business consequences such as potential losses along each link in the business process chain. “The right way forward for us was to combine our UC4:global with the real-time views generated by
the HP OpenView Business Service Management solution,” recalls Vincent Stüger.

Since few companies exhibit this type of savvy in aligning business processes to the capacity of the IT infrastructure, business executives often scratch their heads on returns that don’t meet initial project ROI justifications as they lack the level of detail needed to isolate the unhealthy components of the business process. More and more companies are realizing that in today’s market, it’s not about the technology, it’s about creating value for shareholders, investors, and customers.”

In the past, IT teams have taken a bottoms-up approach to IT investment with a focus on quantifying infrastructure failures and downtime for business as a means to justify projects – but this is changing. Business strategy is now driving IT investment in standardized, enterprise-wide processes, that alignment to the business processes and provide efficiencies. Business executives all the way up the management hierarchy are looking for reporting mechanisms to measure performance and business process health for their organization. “At the top of the organization, executives rely on strategic reporting tools like Balanced Score Cards and tactical reports that provide business health metrics. Similarly, IT has no shortage of tools that tell operations teams utilization, response times, availability, and other IT centric metrics that have, at best, an indirect business value. What appears to be a missing piece is the bridge in the middle that provides a unified true view of the current state of the company, and its capacity to transact business – and that’s where Business Service Management (BSM) provides enormous value.

BSM provides a pragmatic view of business process metrics to IT performance, from which you can make sound and timely decisions that impact enterprise value, such as revenue, customer satisfaction, and shareholder interests..

By definition, BSM is an approach where IT technology functions are directly mapped to a set of business services and metrics. It incorporates traditional service level management (SLM), which has historically had a very technical orientation with granular performance and availability metrics being used as the measure of success. BSM is different because it is completely dependent upon business metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) that are meaningful outside of IT.

“Too often the discussion now starts with ‘architecture’ approaches such as Web Services, Service Oriented Architectures or Composite Applications.” explains John Carlstrom. “Though these architectures have merit, a strict technology driven approach can fail the business because it does not link IT component performance to business metrics in one operational view. Conversely, BSM takes an all-encompassing view of business operations and goals, the role IT plays and the maturity of both to utilize the full potential of the other.”

With this all-encompassing view, companies can begin to identify and resolve gaps, inefficiencies and utter failures between IT operations and business operations. This process ultimately leads to business growth, increased operations and IT efficiency, the ability to reach new customers and markets and a real-time examination of business performance for better, more responsive decision-making.

Acronyms and broad perspectives aside, the key questions remain: how does an organization get disparate technology not only moving in the same direction, but also mapped directly to business goals? Where does this process alignment really begin? Does it start at the bottom, focusing first on the network? Is it set in motion at the top, taking a hard look at the business? Or does it commence at the center of operations, with a concentration on processes?

There is a new way to look at the decades old conundrum of business and IT alignment, which begins and ends with a clear focus on the business. Organizations need to establish and grow their IT systems through clear alignment to business metrics. Conversely IT must maintain not only a business perspective, but advise the business on strategies that won’t live up to reality, based on current or planned IT capacity or services. Accordingly, infrastructure optimization and the deployment of tools and processes for automation and control should always map to business and IT metrics.

HP’s solution for achieving similar alignment, embodied in HP OpenView Management Software, is to provide a common dashboard that is connected to the appropriate data sources and provides a complete vantage point from which to see current operations.

“The challenge for organizations is to put the right processes in place and map them to the right tools, which then link to the business metrics in a real and meaningful way,” Carlstrom explains. “Based on BSM methodology, HP OpenView delivers the tools and perspective necessary to advance business performance.”

HP OpenView software offers a unified view of IT operations, applications and help desk consoles correlated to relevant business measures and goals. In careful orchestration that can take weeks instead of years, stakeholders from across an organization can share the same view of operations in real time, which is relevant to their business goals and enables them to make sound, timely decisions as a result.

With tools and methodologies that deliver an enterprise-wide perspective of IT and business alignment, organizations can move from maintenance to innovation, drive cost out of their operations, and increase their revenue potential.