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May 29, 2006

Strategic Communications in Business-IT Alignment

Recently I was asked to revisit the book "The IT Strategy Management Process" by Eugen Oetringer (who has related work seen elsewhere here on Archestra). Oetringer's broad sweep in this book comes close to making its title a misnomer, as the first summation of the book's import is really about the creation of an internal commerce of knowledge to facilitate governance of IT operational performance.

However, the book's subtitle, "Supporting IT Services Through Effective Knowledge Management", promises a focus that would resolve some of the competition for attention otherwise being waged within its pages by governance, strategy, KM, and change management.

The question then becomes one of what KM's support of IT services has to do with strategy, and why this connection should be considered a management process for IT strategy.

In this book, the best approach to seeing that is to avoid trying to fit the book into other molds of that type. Instead, assume that the book brings whatever it needs, itself -- and chart out the connections.

As shown below in our original take (i.e., not Mr. Oetringer's, and not in the book), the key feature of Oetringer's discussion is the creation of a knowledge repository, for which the book offers an enormous amount of systematically integrated construction detail. The purpose of this repository (at bottom) is to foster the improvement of management's ability to optimize its performance (at top) in terms of solving organizational problems (in between). The organizational problems come in two broad categories -- structure and environment. Our original diagram here highlights in red the challenges in these different areas of concern.

As sorted out through this picture, one major corresponding observation in Oetringer's sweep of issues is that the structural problems suffer from sustained but inadequate responses, while the environmental problems risk going altogether neglected (sometimes unnoticeably). Intellectual capital is the common solution to the pair of problem areas: it most notably supplies strategy and policy in the prior void on the environmental side; meanwhile it improves the structural side.

With the assumption that this fortification "optimizes" I.T. management's ability to generate better services, business can better rely on IT to help successfully adjust to the continuing variability of the business operating conditions.

Given the above, the two obvious questions that the summary diagram raises are:

1. What is the mechanism by which the intellectual capital (generated from the underlying KM) is appropriately "invested" with the returns being effective structural and environmental management practices?

2. What is the mechanism whereby the incorporation of strategy is continually attended as a lifecycle of strategy use and renewal?

Overall, Oetringer's explanations point at communications as the primary "process" providing the mechanisms for these management enhancements. Oetringer's level of thoroughness shows that the communications issues are both pervasive and profound, but one might argue that the communications -- not the IT services -- are the focus of the KM contribution. However, in a success story, the services eventually gain benefit at their location farther up the value stack.

Consequently, from the standpoint of best categorizing the book's discussion, one may find both the title and sub-title of the book still somewhat orbital to the real distinction that it offers. However, as a hierarchical layout of the book's context, the titles do draw you to his discussion through explicit assertions of why you should care.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at May 29, 2006 12:46 PM

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