Why Align with the Business
Why Align?
A technology team does not exist in a vacuum. Each exists to fulfill or support a specific business goal.
A website serves a purpose for visitors or it isn’t needed. Software or hardware are for buyers or users who need it. Tech teams support these things.
The distinction between “business” and “technology” teams is bureaucratic.
Technology is part of the business but bureaucratic management techniques need to partition and categorize in an effort to standardize and streamline.
Bureaucratic management is necessary in large organizations, and these side-effects are part of what a technical manager must navigate. (And there are a ton of ways to do it! Lean, Agile, and more are all attempts to help!)
Whatever the reason, technology is treated as outside of the business in many organizations for two reasons.
- Specialization narrows to a tighter focus as organizations grow and bureaucracy is established. The less group specialization overlaps, the more likely two groups will see each other as disconnected from a subjective understanding of “business goals”.
- Technology requires specialized training, much like accounting or operations specializations. People who work with technology spend years learning specific skills that were not used outside of their areas. Jargon, technologies, and misunderstood workings of technology caused technology to be isolated from other business functions.
These factors mean technology teams often struggle to stay aligned with business goals because they are often excluded from key business conversations. Technology teams learn about decisions that impact their plans, budgets, or options after the decisions are made in other parts of the business.
This is a problem of substandard optimization.
One group or silo in an organization makes decisions that optimize their local situation but results in the end-to-end process becoming less optimal as a result.
In larger organizations where there are "functional silos" slowing communications and collaboration, the technical manager needs to find ways to keep technology use aligned with business goals even when the bureaucracy seems to work against this effort.
Why? The perils of misalignment are serious and need to be avoided.
Tech Misalignment
Organizational alignment means people are working towards a common goal. The goal is communicated clearly, success is understood, and there are collaborative efforts to move towards success.
Bureaucratic management tries to facilitate this alignment, but as organizations get larger the complexity and communications challenges grow faster than people can handle. “Information overload” is a common problem in large organizations as reports, alerts, email, chat, and other coordination messages become overwhelming in number.
The technical manager must solve this problem or their team may become misaligned.
The risks of misalignment are grave. A single person who is misaligned is a small issue, solved with coaching or mentoring. When a major part of the organization that enables every part of a modern business loses connection to the strategy, the entire organization is or will be in a crisis.
Wasted Resources (Time & Money)
Work or technology that won’t advance business goals wastes time and money. Opportunity cost is a real thing and a misaligned effort means that a better path is lost.
Small misalignments often vanish in the noise of a large organization. The misdirected time simply vanishes, unnoticed by managers. But large misalignments may create strategic risks that should have been avoidable.
How does a technical manager avoid this? There are signs that misalignment is growing.
Detecting Wasted Resources in Technology
- Disconnected Training or Celebrations: Teams invest in technologies or training that aren’t fully used or are never used! Expensive projects are launched with huge fanfare but slowly go quiet. Teams are dedicated to special projects but the project never moves forward.
- Inefficient Allocations: Team metrics are uneven. Some teams are chronically overworked and are bottlenecks. Others are overstaffed or overfunded without adequate results.
- Poor Communication and/or Collaboration: Multiple teams work on similar problems or have incompatible components that must work together. Teams “discover” this only after investments are made and rework will wreck budgets, schedules, or both.
Tools to Fight Misalignment
Goals, Metrics, and Communications – These are three key concepts that keep technology aligned with a business and point where to look if things signs of misalignment appear. Most of this book will cover these three concepts in various forms and approaches.
Competitive Disadvantage
Technology changes rapidly. Markets evolve. Supply chain efficiencies expand competition at global scales. The internet educates consumers on options and alternatives.
All of this means that the business needs to use technology wisely and quickly (as new capabilities appear). It also means that if a business fails to move decisively, all of the environmental pressures on the business might overwhelm the ability to succeed.
Technology is minimally an enabler for business. It’s impossible to imagine a modern company that worked without email, websites, HR and payroll systems, file servers and printers, and more. In many cases, the use of technology provides a competitive advantage. Many businesses don’t just survive but thrive based on how technology supports the business objectives.
For a technology manager, understanding both why and how a business uses technology can improve the chances the tech team prioritizes and supports work that help the business succeed. Knowing the why and how will pay off as the manager creates goals, roadmaps, plans collaboration, and measures results.
What happens if this alignment fails? Competitive threats of various kinds emerge.
Competitive Threats from Mis-Aligned Technology
- Lack of Innovation and Agility: Competitors who react more quickly to environmental or market changes will be consistently more successful.
- Missed Opportunities for Growth: As new consumer segments emerge, firms that recognize these and act will capture greater portions of available revenue.
- Slower Time to Market: Technology switching costs are a real thing, so when the business realizes that prior investments are mis-aligned, it takes time to adjust. Opportunities are missed as time is wasted to correct the situation.
- Damaged Brand Reputation: The brand value of a company is harmed when the company products don’t work smoothly, are confusing, or lack features that competitors offer. Short-term, these problems may reduce conversion rates. Long-term, customer retention may fall as loyal customers leave for more appealing alternatives.
Employee Morale & Retention
In a later chapter, this book will cover ways to help technical folks stay focused and motivated.
The reason this topic is mentioned now is that people can often tell when the team is adrift. Individual employees will often notice their work is not contributing towards a business objective or their training is being wasted.
When this happens, morale typically falls as people feel disconnected or that their work “doesn’t matter”.
In general, people feel better when they have a purpose or goal at work and a lack of these can demotivate a team. Later chapters will go more deeply into these general topics of morale, retention, and motivation.
Risk & Compliance
If the prior concerns aren’t enough, there’s also a risk that a disconnected technology team creates legal exposures.
For example, as privacy laws and regulations evolve, every technology team needs to know how privacy regulations relate to their work.
Similarly, a technology team could roll out a new feature but because they didn’t know all the geography that might see customer use, a critical legal compliance step is missed.
In an age when a website can reach every person on the planet, technology managers need to consider legal aspects of the work a team performs. The manager must collaborate with attorneys and other risk management professionals to ensure the business is properly following laws, regulations, and ethical standards.
General Legal Risks of Technology Mis-Alignment
- Security Risks: the team needs to be sure that both the customers and the environment are understood so that customer data, system access, and related assets are properly secured.
- Compliance Issues: The legal environment in which the technology assets run need to be clearly understood.
- Budget Issues: If a team doesn’t understand how usage patterns can change, growth models, or usage fees work the company might find itself paying a 3rd party more than expected and budgets can be severely impacted.
Alignment Benefits
Obviously, as technology plans match the strategy that the business sets, investment are focused and optimized. This creates:
- Increased efficiency and productivity: When the technical team is working towards the same goals as the larger company, it wastes less time on non-essential work and the results of work are a better fit for company needs so thus will return higher benefit.
- Improved customer satisfaction: the closer tech teams are to the end-customer, the higher quality the end products the tech team will produce. Questions about unclear requirements, faster feedback for initial releases, and other benefits all surface as the tech team works with the business.
- Enhanced competitiveness: marketing and strategy professionals watch markets and competitors closely to ensure new opportunities (or competitor weakness) are not missed. The faster to get from recognition of an opportunity to the release of a new product, the faster benefits and revenues are generated.