Business and IT alignment

The business system usually evolves with a different pace to that of the information system. Over time, this has resulted in an important loss of alignment between the business system and the information system. This has resulted in applications that do not fully support business tasks, and which have again hindered the evolution of business processes. The consequence has been less flexible and adaptable organizations with less competitive power in the market. Only companies where applications can be quickly and efficiently adapted to changing business needs can stay competitive in the global market.

The loss of alignment between the business and IT has a name IT gap. An IT gap is a common occurrence in almost every company. It is mainly a consequence of the inability of application developers to modify and adapt the applications to business requirements quickly and efficiently.

The main reason probably hides in the fact that in the past neither programming languages and technologies nor architectural design could have anticipated changes. Existing applications had been designed to last. They had been developed in a tightly coupled fashion, which makes changes to specific parts of applications very difficult. Because of dependencies such changes usually have several, often unpredictable, consequences. In addition to the complexity and size of the modification, an important factor is also the state of the application being modified. If an application has a well-defined architecture and has been constructed keeping in mind future modifications, then it will be easier to modify. However, each modification to the application makes its architecture less robust with respect to future changes. Applications that have been maintained for several years and have gone through many modifications usually do not provide robust architecture anymore (unless they have been refactored constantly). Modifying them is difficult, time consuming, and often results in unexpected errors.

Modifying existing applications therefore requires time. This means that an information system cannot react instantly to changes in business processes rather it requires time to implement, test, and deploy the modifications. This time is sometimes referred to as the IT gap time. It is obvious that the gap time should be as short as possible. However, in the real world this is (once again) not always the case.

We have seen that there are at least three important forces that have to be considered:

• Alignment between the business and IT, which is today seen as one of the most important priorities.

• Complexity of existing applications and the overall IT architecture. Modifying them is a complex, difficult, error-prone, and time-consuming task.

• Indispensability of existing applications. Companies rely upon existing applications and very often their core business operations would be jeopardized if existing applications fail.

This makes the primary objective of information systems to provide timely, complete, and easy to modify support for business processes even more difficult to achieve.