Business and Information Technology (hereafter referred to as business-IT) alignment is so passé. Welcome the (relatively) new concept called Business-IT aggregation. The phrase “business aggregation” sometimes refers to a corporation that’s controlled by several key investors tasked to manage the corporation based on a succession plan. The word “aggregation” means the sum of the parts, the totality of components, or simply “the whole”. One dictionary (AllBusiness.com, 2010) defines it as “any bringing together of parts or units to form a collective whole.”
We can take a look at several examples where this concept applies. In macroeconomics, “aggregate demand” means “the sum of government spending, personal consumption expenditures, and business expenditures.” Notice that there is no overlap among these factors. Each domain is distinct and mutually-exclusive from each other yet rich and comprehensive in detail. In marketing, an “aggregation strategy” (AllBusiness.com, 2010) focuses on “the universal desires of a population, and when used by marketers, assumes that consumers in a particular market all want the same thing and are all alike.”
It must be the case between business and IT.
Let me elaborate. Ideally, business and IT both want the same thing. Both aspire for increased market share, a healthy balance sheet, sustainable growth, high customer satisfaction, terrific employee morale, and so on. Whatever the business and operations folks do as well as whatever the IT teams manage and implement should focus on achieving the same thing. The sum total of all their collective efforts and expended energies yield business results that exceed what each unit can accomplish individually.
Moreover, we often hear people refer to something (such as an organization) where the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” What they’re really talking about is aggregation. When we extend the definition of aggregation to refer to the “whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts” then we see the obvious benefit of describing the ideal business and IT relationship as an aggregation rather than alignment.
When people talk about alignment, such as “wheel alignment”, they refer to something that “conforms to a standard.”
But business-minded folks don’t perform to conform to a standard when conducting their day-to-day affairs. IT folks do. Business thrives in change, even chaos, where more business opportunities lie. IT likes to maintain order and be as predictable as possible. If you try to “align” business approaches to IT frameworks, and vice-versa, you’re in for a long battle. It’s a zero-sum game. Business and IT are like oil and water. These never merge or mix, but can co-exist.
Try searching for the term “business-IT aggregation” and you’ll see no more than five results, and all have nothing to do with “business-IT aggregation”. Do the same for “business-IT alignment” and you’ll probably get more than 75,500 results using Google. Perhaps we’ve been approaching the problem wrongly. Perhaps now is the time to shift our paradigm.
The key to an organization’s business and IT success is business-IT aggregation rather than alignment. What you end up with is a “whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts” instead of zero. To wax philosophical, don’t you think in this case, something is better than nothing? How then do you achieve business-IT aggregation? That’s where business architecture plays a major role. Using business capability maps, business architecture is the ideal aggregator and translator of the needs and wants of the organization to achieve business outcomes. I’ll describe this further in a future article.
References
AllBusiness.com. (2010). Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms.
