IT and Business Alignment Intervention
Executive Summary
SITUATION:
A small online B2C company experiencing persistent and increasing friction between IT and the rest of the organisation leading to low morale and a growing unhelpful “them vs us” mentality.
OBJECTIVE:
Increase understanding and alignment between IT and the rest of the organisation reducing points of friction and improving morale within IT.
ACTIONS:
Vista Insights was brought in to apply our proprietary IT strategy alignment process. Over a period of 3 weeks, (and requiring less than 60 minutes from each participant,) Vista Insights collected and analysed data, provided insights and suggested actions to address the key causes of friction.
RESULTS:
Intervention led to a cooperative effort between IT and business leadership to agree a 2-year digital roadmap and the establishment of a community of IT “deputy” roles within each business unit to improve communication around requirements and challenges. A 6 month follow up exercise indicated that friction around IT issues was dramatically reduced and IT was performing far closer to expectations than previously reported.
Solution
Vista Insights used a simple, proprietary methodology to assess the differences of understanding and opinion on IT performance from various key stakeholder groups across the organisation. The survey and analysis touched on the immediate concerns and issues and also established what various visions of the companies IT future could look like, using Vista experience and external perspective to challenge and stimulate possibilities.
The assessment yielded a report on the levels of alignment between IT and the rest of the organisation on a number of key dimensions and a list of recommendations. Vista then facilitated follow up conversations that helped leadership prioritise those recommendations into an action plan
Results
Our analysis yielded 3 distinct views of the appropriate role of IT in the organisation one each from IT, executive leadership and front line staff. We were then able to support the organisation in developing a clearer vision statement on the role of IT and digital in the organisation. Our recommendations included the establishment of a team of digital champions, front line staff from various non-IT functions who were digitally savvy, to help IT shape a digital roadmap to meet that digital vision. A follow up later in the year indicated that the original symptoms of friction and lack of performance against expectations of IT were greatly reduced. Morale within IT had also markedly improved.
Background
Vista Insights was contacted by a small, online B2C organisation looking for help with a long-standing source of friction between the product development and IT teams. As the company’s growth has accelerated, unabated by the COVID 19 pandemic, the problems created by the lack of alignment between IT and the rest of the organisation, generally had increased. Leadership correctly identified that staff within IT and outside IT were honest, loyal and hardworking. So it was difficult to understand why problems continued to persist, let alone escalate. But it was clear that something had to be done to re-build morale and trust across multiple teams and keep the company’s operations smooth and efficient.
Initial Analysis
Initial conversations with business and IT leadership confirmed interest from all sides to do what was best for the organisation. However, ideas about the role of IT today and into the future were not aligned. In a few cases, the ideas about where IT should be positioned in the company were explicit and different with most of the friction seeming to stem from a lack of clarity about what was possible and IT’s role in delivery.