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June 15, 2005
Business-IT Convergence? What happened to Alignment?
CIO Magazine, covering thinking from their CIO's Perspectives on Enterprise Value conference, reports that we've gotten ourselves into another semantic knot. But not a tough one. The debate pits "convergence" versus "alignment". Is Convergence the new and improved Alignment? Is it time to change horses again?
Perhaps what's going on here, in this overall discussion, is just reverse-engineering the underlying systems of a good plan...
Alignment (noun) is a process having the objective of real-time structural compatibility. But convergence (noun) is an event, literally a co-incident, with the characteristic of having critical influence on the state or direction towards some outcome (which is why we care to notice it).
Fundamentally, alignment emphasizes compatibility -- essentially, "usefulness". Convergence emphasizes concurrence -- essentially, "agreement".
But the two-ton idea casting a shadow over both alignment and convergence is "Integration". What hasn't changed with the terms-du-jour is a goal of integrating whatever is called "business strategy" with whatever is called "IT strategy". What has changed is that we now can usually distinguish the need to have operational motives align from the need to have operational outputs converge.
As we move into performance management, we kick things up a level where we then start working on the problem of "making outputs align" and "making objectives converge"; but we already call that "planning."
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at June 15, 2005 6:50 AM
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