Thanks again to the BPM/SOA Consortium for inviting me to speak at the OMG Technical Meeting in Jacksonville, FL on March 24th.  I've been compiling war stories and case studies on this topic over the past year - readers of this blog have seen some of them bubble up to the surface over several posts.  And during the last meeting in Long Beach, it struck me that those of us working on bridging operating models and approaches between Business and IT are missing a critical voice in the room - the voice of the P&L owner.  So for this presentation, I invited several P&L owners who have or are working with us to provide their perspective on what is right and wrong in their IT relationships.  Given how busy these folks are, most of them chose to share their stories as case studies, but some might just show up in Jacksonville with me!

Abstract: A lot has been written and said on the topic of Business/IT Alignment. A lot of methods have been tried, and yet the goal has never seemed as elusive as it does in today's business climate. Business comes to the table with the increased pressures of the business cycle, the ever increasing information velocity, and the ever-more demanding client. IT comes to the table with solutions that seem to only increase in complexity bolstered by ever expanding technology disciplines, vendors, and standards, not to mention the baggage of years of suboptimal decisions coming home to roost. Business comes to the table from the top down. IT from the bottom up. They each speak a myriad of different 'Englishes'. They generally have an issue agreeing on how to define terms of engagement, or even who should own those terms, something we commonly see bubble up to the surface as data governance challenges. The mismatch between the business operating models of IT and their business stakeholders (or BOMM for short) can provide clues as to why the relationship between business and IT sometimes comes to resemble a cold war. This presentation will examine Business IT Alignment Patterns (and anti-Patterns) from the perspective of Business P&L Owners at various sizes of organization.

AAB