Attend any conference, read any analyst report or trade journal, and you will hear the same mantra repeated over and over again - IT needs to be aligned with the business. However, this is far easier said than done. There’s often a lack of communications, or even a level of mistrust between business and IT.

What does it take to attain this vaunted alignment? Better technology? Better management? More enlightenment on the business side? More enlightenment on the IT side? Over the years, I’ve spoken with scores of CIOs and IT managers who were doing a great job of delivering capabilities that were advancing their overall businesses. But for every story of IT-business alignment, there are plenty more about misalignment - stories that never see the light of day, for obvious reasons.

That’s why it was refreshing and instructional to hear, at the recent TIBCO user conference, an example of an IT department that faced daunting challenges with fitting into the business, and through a combination of management and technology initiatives, gained a healthy new respect from business executives.

Simon Post, CTO of Carphone, a large U.K.-based telecom retailer and broadband provider, described the low standing IT once had within his company’s business. The company had seen furious growth - in five years’ time, Carphone grew from an $800 million company to a $4 billion enterprise. The IT department swelled in size as well, growing from a department of 100 people to 3,000.

However, the IT department was seen as huge and unwieldy, and viewed “as a hindrance, not as a partner” to the business, he said - to the point where the business was ready to outsource it all. “Our architecture was willy-nilly - the world’s biggest pile of spaghetti,” he said.

How did Post transform the IT department into a lean, mean machine supporting the business, while gaining valuable support? He did so by launching a concerted effort to focus on the things that mattered in the IT-business relationship - especially the talent and motivation of his people. As part of the transformation, Post sent IT staffers out into the business as emissaries to "communicate our vision,” he explained. Even rank-and-file staff members were encouraged to meet face-to-face with business groups to get feedback on how IT could better serve the business.

“Everybody who was business-facing, we put in relationship training,” Post added. The department also instituted ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) training for its professionals. In addition, bonus systems were revamped, based on a scoring system for efforts that directly increased business performance. The company also launched a concerted effort to reduce turnover in the IT ranks. “Fifty percent of people who joined us left within six months,” Post related. “We’ve got that down to six percent.”

From a technology perspective, the company has been moving to a service-oriented architecture, in which applications are exposed as services the business could tap into and reuse as much as needed. “We tended to think of the world as applications,” Post said. “We’re trying to change our view of the world to a services point of view. This is taking time.”

Post reported that IT department costs have gone down significantly since the new initiatives were put into place. While the company’s retail transactions doubled during this period, the IT cost per transaction dropped by a third, Post said. With a service-oriented architecture in place, Carphone was able to lower its cost per country to almost zero, he said. The initial investment to build each service was more - 200,000 pounds more per service - but because these services were reusable, they could be reused in new business settings.

This challenge of increasing the performance and efficiency of IT operations is being felt across all kinds of enterprises. The need to automate IT processes is pressing. Not only are data center infrastructures becoming more complex, but so are IT processes - such as incident management, server provisioning. The challenge of managing processes that span across multiple brands of enterprise applications adds to this complexity.

However, as Post pointed out, “there is no ERP for IT.” Automation is helping address some IT process issues, but progress is slow. For example, a recent survey of 344 members of the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG), conducted by Unisphere Research, found that three out of four IT operations still either depend on manual scripting, or simply don't know what approaches they should take. The survey found that most organizations are having difficulties managing these mixed environments, and most do not yet have a clear strategy for managing processes that extend across these applications.

IT has done a great job of automating the processes of much of the business. Many organizations have been successfully adopting business process automation to increase the efficiencies of their operations, but, ironically, only have begun to automate IT itself.

About the Author:

Joe McKendrick edits 5 Minute Briefing: Data Center, serving the SHARE community. He can be reached at Joe@dbta.com.