IT Governance course: Conducting a Strategic Alignment Maturity Assessment
An essential part of the assessment process is recognizing that it must be done with a team including both business and IT executives. The convergence on a consensus of the maturity levels and the discussions that ensue are extremely valuable in understanding the problems and opportunities that need to be addressed to improve business-IT alignment. The most important part of the process is the creation of recommendations addressing the problems and opportunities identified. The most difficult step, of course, is actually carrying out the recommendations. This section ties the assessment metrics together.
Each of the criteria and levels are described by a set of attributes that allow a particular dimension to be assessed using a 1 to 5 Likert scale, where:
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1 = this does not fit the organization, or the organization is very ineffective
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2 = low level of fit for the organization
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3 = moderate fit for the organization, or the organization is moderately effective
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4 = this fits most of the organization
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5 = strong level of fit throughout the organization, or the organization is very effective
Different scales can be applied to perform the assessment (e.g., good, fair, poor; 1, 2, 3). However, whatever the scale, it is important to evaluate each of the six criteria with both business and IT executives to obtain an accurate assessment. The intent is to have the team of IT and business executives converge on a maturity level. Typically, the initial review will produce divergent results. This outcome is indicative of the problems/ opportunities being addressed.
The relative importance of each of the attributes within the criteria may differ among organizations. For example, in some organizations the use of SLAs (Service Level Agreements) might not be considered as important to alignment as the effectiveness of liaisons. Hence, giving SLAs a low maturity assessment should not significantly impact the overall rating in this case. However, it would be valuable if the group discusses why the organization does not consider a particular attribute (in this example, SLAs) to be significant.
Using a Delphi approach with a Group Decision Support Tool often helps in attaining the convergence. The author’s experience suggests that "discussions" among the different team members helps to ensure a clearer understanding of the problems and opportunities that need to be addressed.
Keep in mind that the primary objective of the assessment is to identify specific recommendations to improve the alignment of IT and the business. The evaluation team, after assessing each of the six criteria from Level 1 to 5, uses the results to converge on an overall assessment level of the maturity for the firm. They apply the next higher level of maturity as a roadmap to identify what they should do next. A trained facilitator is typically needed for these sessions.
Experience with the initial 25 Fortune 500 companies indicates that more than 80% of the organizations are at Level 2 maturity with some characteristics of Level 3 maturity.
Strategic Alignment as a Process
The approach applied to attain and sustain business-IT alignment focuses on understanding the alignment maturity, and on maximizing alignment enablers and minimizing inhibitors. The process includes the following six steps:
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Set the goals and establish a team. Ensure that there is an executive business sponsor and champion for the assessment. Next, assign a team of both business and IT leaders. Obtaining appropriate representatives from the major business functional organizations (e.g., Marketing, Finance, R&D, Engineering) is critical to the success of the assessment. The purpose of the team is to evaluate the maturity of the business-IT alignment. Once the maturity is understood, the team is expected to define opportunities for enhancing the harmonious relationship of business and IT. Assessments range from three to twelve half-day sessions. The time demanded depends on the number of participants, the degree of consensus required, and the detail of the recommendations to carry out.
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Understand the business-IT linkage. The Strategic Alignment Maturity Assessment is an important tool in understanding the business-IT linkage. The team evaluates each of the six criteria. A trained facilitator can be valuable in guiding the important discussions.
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Analyze and prioritize gaps. Recognize that the different opinions raised by the participants are indicative of the alignment opportunities that exist. Once understood, the group needs to converge on a maturity level. The team must remember that the purpose of this step is to understand the activities necessary to improve the business-IT linkage. The gap between where the organization is today and where the team believes it needs to be are the gaps that need to be prioritized. Apply the next higher level of maturity as a roadmap to identify what can be done next.
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Specify the actions (project management). Naturally, knowing where the organization is with regards to alignment maturity will drive what specific actions are appropriate to enhance IT-business alignment. Assign specific remedial tasks with clearly defined deliverables, ownership, timeframes, resources, risks, and measurements to each of the prioritized gaps.
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Choose and evaluate success criteria. This step necessitates revisiting the goals and regularly discussing the measurement criteria identified to evaluate the implementation of the project plans. The review of the measurements should serve as a learning vehicle to understand how and why the objectives are or are not being met.
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Sustain alignment. Some problems just won’t go away. Why are so many of the inhibitors IT related? Obtaining IT-business alignment is a difficult task. This last step in the process is often the most difficult. To sustain the benefit from IT, an "alignment behavior" must be developed and cultivated. The criteria described to assess alignment maturity provide characteristics of organizations that link IT and business strategies. By adopting these behaviors, companies can increase their potential for a more mature alignment assessment and improve their ability to gain business value from investments in IT. Hence, the continued focus on understanding the alignment maturity for an organization and taking the necessary action to improve the IT-business harmony is key.
