Model For Intergrating IT With Business

We have come across with the shift in focus from Business - IT Alignment to Business-IT integration in ITIL V3. Service Strategy phase of the lifecycle, specifically Strategy Generation (or Strategy Management) process, talks about this integration.

But a query in a practitioner's mind is always there - How to achieve this integration? I am presenting below a model, Business - IT Integration Model, which can help us with achieving this integration.

My model is in extension to the Business-IT alignment Framework (Proposed by: Henderson & Venkatraman).

My model takes into account the fact that traditionally:

• Business Strategy drives Business Infrastructure
  
• Business Strategy drives IT Strategy
• IT Strategy drives IT infrastructure
  

This dependency of IT strategy on business strategy is resulting in the short term IT strategy and goals. In other words this is making it impossible to have a long term IT strategy.

Predominantly in many organization IT is still being treated as a cost center . 'Actual' value proposition of IT to business remains unexplored. This is so since IT is entangled with short term or immediate requests of business on a daily basis and is struck with playing a support role.

Value proposition of IT can only be realized when IT partners the business. This is where my model highlights that:

• Business Strategy and Business Infrastructure drives each other: Strategy could be deliberate or emergent. In case of deliberate strategy, business infrastructure will provide the current state assessment and the defined business strategy will drive the business infrastructure that will be required to support it. On the other hand, although emergent business strategy may drive the business infrastructure but more often it would be the existing business infrastructure that would drive the business strategy.
  
• Business Strategy and IT Strategy drives each other: We know that traditionally IT strategy is based on the business strategy. These IT strategies are short term. But having a long term IT strategy will enable effective business strategy. Whenever any strategy is defined various options are available and these options are to be evaluated. A well defined IT strategy can have a major influence during this process. This is where the business strategy would be driven by IT strategy.
  
• IT Strategy and IT infrastructure drives each other: In the same way as business strategy and business infrastructure drive each other, IT strategy and IT infrastructure also drives each other.
  
• Business infrastructure and IT infrastructure drives each other: Traditionally IT infrastructure is based on the requirements to support IT strategy and business infrastructure. This is where business infrastructure drives IT infrastructure. But when IT infrastructure is futuristic ,based on the long term vision of IT (or IT strategy), it would have the features to support the business which business itself may not have thought of. Thus, it would start driving the business infrastructure.
  
• Evolution of Business/IT strategy and infrastructure is a continual process: The overall evolution of strategy and the infrastructure is a continual process and the continual improvement can be triggered internally by any of the four quadrants or externally (eg. competition, law, marketspace, etc.)