Align your business strategy with your IT Infrastructure 

No matter what industry you’re in, the overwhelming majority will make use of an IT Infrastructure. The mass investment in IT by businesses means they have high expectations and rely on these systems. Businesses look to IT to help reduce costs, increase security, strengthen productivity, and improve internal communications. The importance of IT systems is often overlooked by businesses as the IT strategy is usually just a part of the overall business strategy. This oversight works against an organisation’s best interests as it is counterproductive and causes more problems. Miscommunication across departments is a key issue that comes from not aligning your IT infrastructure. Investment in IT infrastructure has been reported to have a greater impact on a company’s profits than both advertising and Research and Development. This shows the importance of having  a solid IT strategy.

Aligning business and IT strategies organisations can reap the rewards of the following benefits. 

• Clear working vision across organisation towards a common goal

  Because IT is aligned with the rest of the organisation, everyone on the team can work toward the same goal. When departments are not aligned, they focus on their own goals, which means that one area may perform better than the other. This almost gives the impression that they are two separate companies and means that if one area of the company is not performing as expected, the overall company suffers. 

• IT  adds value and helps business strategy succeed

  IT has so many benefits for organisations to make use of. From streamlining processes to strengthening communication. These benefits all pull together to help achieve the overall goals of an organisation. 

• More efficient resource management

  Due to the alignment of all staff in the organisation, you can rest assured everyone’s efforts are optimised as they are working towards the same goal. Staff can focus on activities that are going to add the most value to the business as a whole as well completing tasks sooner. 

• Increased market competitiveness

  Focusing your service offering on the customer is a keyway of staying competitive in the market. The service of your business will be stronger with aligned IT resulting in an improved customer experience. IT strategy can support your business by making processes more efficient, leading to happier customers. 

• Increased profitability

  Aligning business and IT goals can strengthen your business in many ways from keeping costs down to being more competitive in the market. This is due to the transparency that aligning IT and business objectives provides. By keeping costs down, the potential to make more profit is improved. 

• Easier to control and manage risk and compliance issues

  Due to all the business being on one page, monitoring processes becomes easier. This means there is a clear understanding of how all the business can remain compliant as well as communicating other risks such as security across the business. This reduces the chance of disaster such as data loss which can be very costly to an organisation. 

Summary 

To summarise the importance of aligning your Business and IT strategy cannot be denied. Aligning these two strategies allows your business to sing off the same hymn sheet providing guidance across the organisation. This guidance then means your business can perform more efficiently, generating more revenue. Not aligning these two areas of your business can cause issues to operational capacity, meaning workloads get pushed back. This can lead to negative things such as customer dissatisfaction. Xperience can help align these areas of your business with our Cloud and IT service.