Alignment considers both how IT is aligned with the business and how the business should or could be aligned with IT. Whatever term is preferred to describe this fundamental relationship, alignment remains a persistent and pervasive problem that demands an ongoing process to ensure that IT and business strategies adapt effectively and efficiently together.

Enlightening line management on technology’s possibilities and limitations is hard; so is setting IT priorities, developing resources and skills, and integrating systems/services. It is even tougher to keep business and IT aligned as business strategies and technology evolve.

There is no silver-bullet solution, but achieving alignment is possible. A decade of research has found that mature alignment requires effective governance, partnership, communications, value analytics, technical services, and people, as illustrated in the alignment maturity criteria below.

The methodology developed by Doctor Jerry Luftman for assessing how ready your company or business unit is to create, improve, and sustain alignment has been successfully applied by over one-third of the Global 1,000 companies, as well as 100’s of organizations of every size. In addition to identifying opportunities for improving the business-IT relationship, the benchmarking insights are vital.

An alignment maturity assessment tool is also available to enhance the relationship between service providers and clients.

Significant new research provides demonstrable evidence correlating organizations overall performance with higher IT-business alignment maturity.