Alignment with IT Happens at Every Level - 5 Things You Can Do to Get There
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

Alignment between information services and the IT department should happen at every level of the organisation. Jinfo's director of research, Robin Neidorf, explains how to make this happen.

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You might think that alignment between information services and the IT department has to be at the strategic level, or why bother. But alignment begins at the foundation - every time you ask for technical help - and continues all the way up through project work to strategy.

This was one of the happy insights of Jinfo's Research Focus, "Strategic Alignment of IS and IT". It's not all or nothing: important progress with alignment can begin at the most basic level.

Start by improving your team's interactions with the IT helpdesk or query system. Learn exactly how that works, and how IT measures success of the system, and vigorously train your team to achieve excellence in interacting with IT at this level.

Then consider project work: document what success looks like, in collaborative projects with IT... or even projects where you need a bit of IT expertise but not a full collaboration. Document, too, how you want IT to work with you on projects, and make sure you have clear, easy lines of communication for them to find the expertise they need.

Strategic alignment is the goal - when IT and information services have a shared vision for supporting the needs of the business through information. But it's too easy to be frustrated by lack of alignment at the top, while failing to attend to the fundamentals of communication, workflow and relationships.

What You Need To Do

1. Research the requirements and preferences at the transactional level of IT
   
   
2. Train for continuous improvement in meeting and exceeding IT's expectations
   
   
3. Research the structure of IT, particularly the project management layer
   
   
4. Compare IT project management to your project management, and consider ways to better align the processes; share these suggestions with counterparts in IT
   
   
5. Research top-level IT goals and milestones; compare those goals to yours and consider where they overlap; articulate these overlaps.

Get started now, with these Jinfo Articles and Reports:

• A More Structured Way of Working with IT
  Article by Steve Bynghall on Tuesday, 1st March 2016

• The Role of Research in Realigning Your Relationship With IT
  Article by Shimrit Janes on Tuesday, 23rd February 2016

• All the Ways We Can Misunderstand IT Colleagues
  Article by Robin Neidorf on Friday, 19th February 2016

• Make It Easy for IT Colleagues to Work With You
  Article by Robin Neidorf on Friday, 29th January 2016

• Model - Understanding IT Characteristics
  Report on Tuesday, 23rd February 2016

The main lessons learned from this three-month Research Focus, plus a thematic index to all content published, are listed in the report Insights and Actions from the Research Focus "Strategic Alignment of IS and IT", visit the Research Focus page to get your copy.

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