One of the central challenges of management is ensuring that the entire organization is working towards the same goals.  The 'Management by Objectives' process seeks to accomplish this by making the organization goals visible and encouraging groups within the organization to formulate goals in support of the overall organization. The goals of the department should be directly traceable to support the overall organization goals. This is the process of alignment. (It should be noted in passing that failure to share goals top down can be very destructive to both the MBO process and organization morale.)

Goal alignment and managing to achieve goals is helped through use of a sharable planning tool. ManagePro, a product of Performance Solutions Technology, is superb for this purpose.  Technology Strategists has been using this as a management and planning tool for many years. The ManagePro web site is worth perusing for information on the use of the tool for strategic planning and many other business uses.

Information technology is really no different from any other business function. (There are many parties that would like for business management to believe otherwise,  and some have been very effective in disseminating this message to their profit.)  It may be helpful to think of IT as though it were a factory. It is, really, a factory for processing information that is the lifeblood of the overall business.

Carrying the analogy a bit further -- factories must be equipped with machinery suitable for the intended product and capable of handling the needed volumes.  There are often many choices of manufacturing approach -- implementing most choices requires lead time to engineer, buy, install and configure before becoming productive. Hopefully, the product will still be needed by the time everything is ready. Operation of this machinery is ultimately performed by people who must be trained. And who fall ill or go on vacation.  Setup and operating information needs to be written down -- especially if any custom tooling was created to facilitate the process. Machinery wears out and must be maintained regularly. And finally, machinery does become obsolete as standards change and spare parts become more difficult to obtain. It is ultimately a return on investment question -- at what point is it no longer profitable (and competitive) to  retain the same machinery?

(What does make computer technology a bit different is that the economic life of hardware and software can be many years -- but conscious choices by hardware manufacturers to limit availability of spares and tendencies by software manufacturers to add more features (bloatware) rather than fix bugs, increasing operating requirements -- which with marketing creates an impression of accelerated obsolescence.)

The process of aligning Information Technology (IT) to the overall goals of the business is very similar to the process of implementing and operating a factory. In the planning process, business goals must be visible -- and the activities of IT must be tightly coupled to support those goals.  Unlike a factory, the sources and sinks of information processing are intertwined with the day to day operation of the business -- IT cannot be considered a thing apart. (We will ignore for the time being the potential for IT to facilitate restructuring of business processes for improved economics and performance.) The portfolio of applications provided by IT need to be appropriate to the intended needs of the business -- both for function and volume. These and the servers  in which they operate are the machines for the factory.

Knowing the relationship between business functions and supporting information technology (or potential supporting technology) -- following the factory analogy it is knowing which processes/machines support which functions is crucial to effective planning. The dependency relationships revealed by a Business Impact Assessment can be helpful in making this association -- particularly if lateral linkages across functions has been explored. Similarly, a good capacity plan for servers, storage and networks, has explored the relationship between business volumes and resource requirements. Staff requirements follow similar relationships -- especially support staff. And changes always increase the need for support (and training). It should be possible in many cases to project the impact of future business plans on the IT infrastructure  and staff -- which may underscore future needs that should be fed back into the capital spending plan and operating budget.

The net of this activity is that the business must present to Information Technology management a prioritized hierarchy of goals for the overall business.  As goals are developed, business management should be asking 'how can IT help achieve this goal'? But at the very least the question 'how is IT facilitating the achievement of this goal' should be asked by IT management. The relationships do not always suggest themselves -- there are a number of techniques to align IT project objectives with business goals which may be helpful. Hopefully, a dialog will ensue that will increase mutual awareness of needs and capabilities between business management and Information Technology.  Similarly, each activity within IT should be reviewed to ascertain what overall business goals it helps realize.  It is understanding this reciprocal relationship that facilitates goal alignment. The goal management tool will not make these decisions, the relationships must be developed by management -- the tool just makes it easier to see the planning landscape and share status and dependency information.

Gradually, a network of IT-specific goals will be compiled, entered into ManagePro and linked to associated business goals. Key capacity factors, such as disk storage in use, may be setup as a measure and tracked with progress data.  There may even be some virtue in establishing key systems as pseuo-employees and assigning them to business goals -- periodic reviews as prompted by ManagePro could help stay on top of key resources. Project goals for new technology and significant 'to do's also becomes part of the landscape. Identifying appropriate levels of risk in the goal description is very helpful.

One benefit of using ManagePro for this is the visibility afforded by the goal status board.  This provides a summary view of the rolled up status of subsidiary goals. Alternate views expose risks identified in the goals and the status of target dates -- this is much more powerful than examining a pile of status reports and project diagrams. One nice capability is the ability to drill down into the hierarchy to see the status of lower level goals -- this information is often distilled out with manually prepared status reports.

What is important is that a shared goal management tool enables business and technologists to work to the same plan.  This and the shared understanding that should have developed in aligning business and technology goals will over time enhance the profitability of the firm.