One of the prevailing themes of discussions at this year's ACORD LOMA conference revolved around the role a sound architecture plays in the ultimate delivery of business value, and in the seemingly never-ending quest of IT and business alignment.

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

In this new world of leveraging business technology for competitive value, IT and business alignment are just the table stakes for being in the game. Future focused organizations achieved this long ago and have evolved into seamlessly collaborative environments in which there is no longer any discernible difference between the business and IT disciplines. In short, well-architected business technology solutions and services are the new drivers of business and competitive value, and the barriers between the business and IT are non-existent.

Think about it as being analogous to software versioning, and the relationship between business and IT divisions as a progression of versions, each with increased compatibilities and capabilities. In Version 1, the relationship between the business and IT worlds was all about making sure that the hardware worked and the system was available after a long night of batch processing. In Version 2 the relationship focused on IT expense management and on running IT with the kind of governance and metrics expected of business units.

Version 3 was all about IT understanding the business as well or better than those actually in the business area, and using that knowledge to collaborate with business partners to crank out relevant and effective business requirements that would lead to, at least theoretically, better systems and business solutions. Version 4, which just ended, was about reaching the utopia of business and IT alignment—a state in which the goals, objectives, and capabilities of the enterprise are more or less perfectly aligned with the goals, objectives, and capabilities of the IT division.

And that brings us to Version 5, a new release of this complex software package of business and IT relationships. In this version IT is assumed to have mastered all of the previous versions, and is now expected to provide business and technology leadership in the areas of innovation, application mobility, infrastructure and employee virtualization, and the like. In many ways this version might be the most challenging of all, because unlike any of the previous versions, this installs the properly positioned IT disciplines as full partners in the business of running a business.

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

The existence of language barriers between the business and IT is no longer acceptable and even worse than that it's not particularly smart, and it certainly does not lead to any competitive advantage. A well conceived and articulated architectural vision that is collaboratively arrived at is a crucial early step on the road to both business and IT learning and collaborating in the same language. In Version 5 of business and IT, the old language is alignment – the new language is something called leadership.

Formerly CIO of Amerisure, Frank Petersmark is CIO advocate with X by 2 (www.xby2.com), a Farmington Hills, Mich., software architecture consulting firm specializing in the insurance industry. He can be reached at Fpetersmark@xby2.com or 248-538-2012.

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IT Needs to Assume Leadership Role

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