Getting in Step on IT Alignment: Experts Share Opinions
Mon, January 01, 2001
CIO — Try to get six people to agree on anything—Thai or Indian food, blockbuster or art film, or even when to slow down for a yellow light. Now try to get six executives to agree on the basic principles that lead to well-aligned companies. Sound impossible? We knew it wouldn’t be easy, but we had to try. n For the flagship piece of this "Closing the Gap" special issue, we assembled a dream team of sorts—three CIOs, a CEO, a head of administration and finance, and a head of sales and marketing—for some frank talk about the fuzzy and far-reaching subject of alignment. These brave panelists were handpicked from companies (old and new, big and bigger, and from a variety of industries) that in one way or another are making serious efforts to integrate IT into business planning. (See our panelists’ introductions scattered throughout this article.) With the help of moderator Thornton May of Guardent, a digital security company based in Waltham, Mass., this gang tackled some tough questions: What is right and wrong with the alignment of IT and business strategy? What causes misalignment? Where do business and IT leaders fall short? And most important, what can be done on both sides to better align business and IT strategy? n The answers may surprise you, but the big shock for us was how our panelists easily agreed on these points. "It’s interesting how all of us are thinking alike," said Starbucks CIO Ted DellaVecchia during our discussion. Operating outside of one company’s politics or the constraints of a particular project, the panelists agreed on some basic tenets. n Naturally, there was polite dissension. The panelists were divided on the role business executives should play in vendor management and even on the most basic question of whether alignment has improved in the past two decades. "My first year in IT we talked about alignment," lamented former Dell CIO Jerry Gregoire, "and 27 years later, we’re still talking about alignment." Here’s hoping that 27 years from now, CIO will report on "What Ever Happened to Misalignment?" In the meantime, read on for the insights and experiences that led to "The 8 Commandments of Alignment" on Page 93.
Thornton May, moderator: Jack, I thought we might start [by hearing your perspective on alignment] as a CEO and as a person who didn’t pop out of the womb being a technologist, if you will.
Jack Brennan, chairman and CEO of Vanguard Group: Seven or eight years ago we started something called our IT voyage. Everything at Vanguard is nautical. Our logo is a ship, and we have crew members and we eat in galleys. The idea was encapsulated in one statement that our CIO reminds people of all the time: If there’s a failure, it’s the head of the business who gets fired. That statement was intended to make everybody acknowledge that, one, the IS department is integral to the business, and two, it has no money. Nobody other than [Vanguard] pays them. We’ve been through a radical shift philosophically and operationally; we’ve tried to integrate the business and technology units and people as tightly as possible. It took a lot of trauma. Many people who don’t work here anymore couldn’t make the adjustment. They wanted to be able to blame IS when things didn’t go well. And it took cross-fertilization of IT people working in the business and vice versa. It’s never good enough, but I feel great relative to where we were when we started this voyage.
