Your business strategy is the combination of the plans and decisions you make to accomplish your overall business goals. To help you achieve this, you need an IT strategy that helps you achieve your objectives.
While business strategy and IT strategy are two different plans, it’s critical that your IT strategy is designed to help support your overall business strategy. If they aren’t aligned, or your IT is ad hoc, you’ll find yourself wasting a lot of time, money and effort.
To stop this from happening, let’s take a more detailed look into the importance of aligning your IT strategy with your business strategy and some of the common reasons for misalignment.
Why businesses need to align their IT strategy with their business strategy
While there can be a lot of work involved, there’s also a lot to be gained from aligning your IT strategy with your business strategy. Here are just some of the many benefits that businesses can gain from using modern technology to achieve business objectives.
#1 - Helps you focus on business objectives
Aligning your strategies can help your company better focus on business objectives in two ways. Firstly, good IT decisions can provide valuable data and information. This will help improve decision making in many different areas of your business, leading to profitable growth.
In addition, when you make IT decisions with your business strategy in mind, the technologies you invest in will not only improve your day-to-day operations but help keep your company on track for its long-term goals.
#2 - Helps you use resources better
No matter the size of your business, the efficient use of resources is critical. This includes money, time, labour and more. As a result, you must make every decision IT investment counts by maximizing its benefit. And this is best achieved by aligning it with your overall business strategy.
#3 - Helps you be more competitive
Technology is an important part of how businesses operate. When you make IT decisions that align with your overall goals, you can help improve your competitive advantage. Technology enables you to better compete with other businesses in your industry and better meet the expectations of your customers.
Reasons why businesses have issues aligning their IT and business strategy
There are several different reasons why businesses have a misalignment between these two important strategies.
A desire to have new technologies – When leaders have an interest in technology, they can get caught up in owning the latest technologies, even if those technologies don’t do anything to help meet business objectives.
Changes in leadership – When a new leader steps in, they often look for easy ways to cut costs and improve the bottom line. Often, this means reversing IT decisions. While this can be a quick way to save money in the short term, this sudden reversal can cause IT and business strategy misalignments.
If it ain’t broke … – It’s not uncommon for businesses to hold a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. This can result in companies owning outdated and legacy technology that just about gets the job done, but doesn’t help the business achieve its overall goals.
Lack of IT experience – When those making the IT decisions don’t fully understand the technology, they can be more inclined to disapprove requests.
Lack of business knowledge – Conversely, sometimes those making the IT decisions have a great understanding of the technology but not of the business’ goals. This can lead them to buy tech that doesn’t align with the strategy. Both the business and IT teams should be aligned on what they are trying to achieve.
If you are worried you may have an alignment problem with your IT and business strategy, for these or any of these reasons, contact us today. Our team would be happy to talk to you about your goals and how technology can help you make better use of resources, gain a competitive edge, meet your objectives and improve your company’s success.
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