One of the prevailing themes of discussions at this year's ACORDLOMA conference revolved around the role a sound architecture playsin the ultimate delivery of business value, and in the seeminglynever-ending quest of IT and business alignment.

While the first part of this theme certainly remains true, thenotion that EA and IT groups are still running after the alignmentpoltergeist seems dated at best, and perhaps even harmful.

In this new world of leveraging business technology forcompetitive value, IT and business alignment are just the tablestakes for being in the game. Future focused organizationsachieved this long ago and have evolved into seamlesslycollaborative environments in which there is no longer anydiscernible difference between the business and IT disciplines. In short, well-architected business technology solutions andservices are the new drivers of business and competitive value, andthe barriers between the business and IT are non-existent.

Think about it as being analogous to software versioning, andthe relationship between business and IT divisions as a progressionof versions, each with increased compatibilities andcapabilities. In Version 1, the relationship between thebusiness and IT worlds was all about making sure that the hardwareworked and the system was available after a long night of batchprocessing. In Version 2 the relationship focused on ITexpense management and on running IT with the kind of governanceand metrics expected of business units.

Version 3 was all about IT understanding the business as well orbetter than those actually in the business area, and using thatknowledge to collaborate with business partners to crank outrelevant and effective business requirements that would lead to, atleast theoretically, better systems and business solutions. Version 4, which just ended, was about reaching the utopia ofbusiness and IT alignment—a state in which the goals, objectives,and capabilities of the enterprise are more or less perfectlyaligned with the goals, objectives, and capabilities of the ITdivision.

And that brings us to Version 5, a new release of this complexsoftware package of business and IT relationships. In this versionIT is assumed to have mastered all of the previous versions, and isnow expected to provide business and technology leadership in theareas of innovation, application mobility, infrastructure andemployee virtualization, and the like. In many ways thisversion might be the most challenging of all, because unlike any ofthe previous versions, this installs the properly positioned ITdisciplines as full partners in the business of running abusiness.

The progression through these versions, which of course arereally organizational evolutions, has implications, and one of thechief among them is that in this upgraded version the new languageof business is technology, and the new language of technology isbusiness.

The existence of language barriers between the businessand IT is no longer acceptable and even worse than that it's notparticularly smart, and it certainly does not lead to anycompetitive advantage. A well conceived and articulatedarchitectural vision that is collaboratively arrived at is acrucial early step on the road to both business and IT learning andcollaborating in the same language. In Version 5 of business andIT, the old language is alignment – the new language is somethingcalled leadership.

Formerly CIO of Amerisure, Frank Petersmark is CIO advocate withX by 2 (www.xby2.com), a Farmington Hills, Mich., softwarearchitecture consulting firm specializing in the insuranceindustry. He can be reached at [email protected] or248-538-2012.