Alignment Is Everything In IT

Every business is a bit like an organism.

Regardless of the sector and market, a business needs to function in a healthy, unified way in order to have any hope at success.

That means each part of the business needs to talk to the others and share a common understanding of the values and vision they are trying to uphold.

And this is increasingly tricky, as specialism become more and more separate.

IT in particular is often treated as a side-entity, a kind of sub-business filled with people who only really appear when something’s gone wrong.

And this can cause some real issue for the organism.

By having such a central part of a business’s infrastructure either undervalued or unaligned, there is a real risk of miscommunication and misaligned values and vision.

Which many businesses believe is fine.

But this is because they are under the impression that IT either works or it doesn’t.

So IT people are either effective or they aren’t.

And if they aren’t, they can be replaced.

The reality, however, is any IT team worth its salt has at its finger tips a whole host of different software, hardware and structural choices which it can implement and recommend to respond to the specific needs and wants of a business.

And by never having a conversation about visions and values, businesses often miss out on the possibility to have their IT team purposefully construct a bespoke system which would be better suited to their specific needs.

Because a really great leader wants everything in their organism to be in alignment, working in harmony and working as well as they can.

Imagine trying to recommend a task management programme to a business without any understanding of how they operate or what they need it for.

Clearly, the chances of making the best possible choice are limited.

So what we recommend, both for the businesses we work with and any business working with outsourced IT, is to focus early in the relationship on those really important conversations where ideas are shared and visions are aligned.

You might even find you enjoy the chat.