In the current environment, it's difficult to imagine any company that doesn't include their IT department amongst the most indispensable components of their entire operation. The advantages that have evolved from embedding IT deeper into business structure are undeniable, however for some that integration remains unsettled.
Having a section of your business out of alignment can obviously be a source of frustration, but when it comes to a critical department like IT, more serious problems can quickly develop. The amount of interconnection across all levels of a business is often held in place by a carefully orchestrated IT strategy, so when events transpire to impact one area, it's often felt across the board.
To counter the challenges of having a somewhat isolated, autonomous IT department, it makes sense to bring it into alignment with the overall business strategy, and take a more holistic approach to your operations.
The perils of poor alignment
According to Deloitte, discussing how to better align corporate and IT strategy was a regular occurrence for only around one third of companies, suggesting that many failed to grasp the importance of the issue. The fallout from this disconnect was felt by those organisations surveyed in a number of ways, including failure to meet time and budget constraints for IT projects, financial reports not being delivered in a timely fashion and poor implementation of security controls.
Meanwhile, McKinsey & Company notes that research has shown well-aligned organisations - populated by people who understand the overall company direction - are twice as likely to display above-average earnings performance.
Taking your organisation from a position where discordant IT strategy is holding you back to one where your business goals are supported at all levels is an effective path to greater agility, and can also cut back on risk. Research from IBM shows that fostering interconnection allows companies to react more quickly to changes and threats, reduce financial exposure and protect their brand.
Getting your strategic ducks in a row
One of the greatest challenges in running an enterprise is understanding precisely where performance is high (or low), and being able to gauge why that is the case. Particularly for businesses with low margins, like retailers, wholesalers and logistics operators, getting a handle on how improvements can be made is an essential part of strategising and planning for future growth.
Perhaps more than any other area, it's here that the meeting of IT with other levels of the organisation has a huge amount of potential. Analysing and deploying business intelligence (BI) gleaned from collected data can further assist in the decision making process, as long as your IT department is well set-up to share insights across the company.
Choosing the right BI solution isn't always easy, however. Low margin businesses must be able to get the most value for their limited budget as possible, so taking total cost of ownership (TCO) into account is essential. Resources may be tight, so to get the most bang for your buck you want a system that's comprehensive enough to cover a large amount of detail, but not so complicated that you need to hire additional employees just to wrangle it.
Getting bogged down in slow processes can have a significant impact on TCO, not to mention business agility. A solution like Qlik's BI software can deliver value to your organisation much faster, and pull disparate data from all corners of your company to be quickly analysed and shared across multiple levels, without the need for additional resources.
For more information about how organisational issues associated with data could be damaging to your business, download this Harvard Business Review whitepaper: Data and Organisational Issues Reduce Confidence.
