Strategic Alignment Components: Business & IT

BUSINESS STRATEGY

·    Scope – Includes the markets, products, services, groups of customers/clients, and locations where an enterprise competes as well as the buyers, competitors, suppliers and potential competitors that affect the competitive business environment.

·    Competencies – The critical success factors and core competencies that provide a firm with a potential competitive edge. This includes brand, research, manufacturing and product development, cost and pricing structure, and sales and distribution channels.

·    Governance – How companies set the relationship between management stockholders and the board of directors. Also included are how the company is affected by government regulations, and how the firm manages their relationships and alliances with strategic partners.

ORGANIZATION INFRASTRUCTURE & PROCESSES

·    Administrative Structure – The way the firm organizes its businesses. Examples include central, decentralize, matrix, horizontal, vertical, geographic, and functional.

·    Processes - How the firm's business activities (the work performed by employees) operate or flow. Major issues include value-added activities and process improvement.

·    Skills – H/R considerations such as how to hire/fire, motivate, train/educate, and culture.

IT STRATEGY

·     Technology Scope - The important information applications and technologies

·     Systemic Competencies - Those capabilities (e.g., access to information that is important to the creation/achievement of a company's strategies) that distinguishes the IT services.

·     IT Governance - How the authority for resources, risk, and responsibility for IT is shared between business partners, IT management and service providers. Project selection and prioritization issues are included here.

IT INFRASTRUCTURE AND PROCESSES

·         Architecture - The technology priorities, policies, and choices that allow applications, software, networks, hardware, and data management to be integrated into a cohesive platform.

·         Processes - Those practices and activities carried out to develop and maintain applications and manage IT infrastructure.

·         Skills - IT human resource considerations such as how to hire/fire, motivate, train/educate, and culture.