I’m getting a bit tired of hearing about the need for “alignment” between the business and Technology.    What this implies is that IT’s priorities are different than that of the business.  When most people say IT isn’t “aligned” to business what they usually mean is “they aren’t making my project a priority”.

I have two suggestions:

• Every single project needs an executive sponsor.  Period.   
• There must be an effective prioritization process that works across the organization and involves executive management.  This is essential – and this is where the rubber meets the road since there are always more demands at any given time than IT can meet. 

If you do those two things well then how can IT ever get out of alignment?

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Many CTOs or CIOs have championed the “buy it, don’t build it mantra” (including yours truly).  But the implication of buying things is effective vendor management.  Vendor management – choosing which ones and how many – affects our core ability to deliver service to the businesses we serve.

If we have too many vendors, or poor vendor management practices, we will spend too much of our precious time and resources in vendor dog-and-pony shows, playing golf, managing interoperability conflicts among vendors and trying to herd all the vendors into cohesive IT services.

I believe there is a very real “tax” each time a new vendor is added to the roster. One CIO in an article I read quantified the cost in man-hours of dealing with a vendor.  He estimated that a one-product vendor requires more than 80 hours of staff time each year in a best-case scenario.  Vendors can chew up MANY hours with demands for meetings, nondisclosure events and other activities that may be less than valuable from the perspective of getting things done. (continue reading…)