-
blog search
-
most recent posts
post calendar
categories
Why we changed the name of our blog, and what it means for IT-business alignment
Monday, February 7, 2011 by Neil Ward-Dutton
The very eagle-eyed among you might have noticed that a few days ago, this blog’s name changed. For five years or so, it’s been called ‘On IT-business alignment, and related things: now it’s simply called ‘MWD’s Insights blog’.
So I guess two questions are: (1) why change it? and (2) why bother to write a blog post about the change?
The answer in both cases is that in order to make our focus and approach more immediately obvious, we’ve made a change to the way we present our research, and the way we explain what we do.
When we started MWD Advisors in 2005, we did so because we saw an opportunity. Many of the most interesting questions we were fielding in our previous industry analyst jobs weren’t about individual technology products; they were about how organisations could make the most of IT investments they’d already made, together with IT investments they wanted to make, to maximise the business value they could create. Sometimes those questions were expressed in terms of architecture; sometimes in terms of governance; sometimes in terms of strategy.
We decided to start MWD Advisors with this core issue – how you drive IT investment and service delivery to create real business value – as our ‘centre of gravity’. Over the years we’ve tweaked our services and research programmes a number of times, but this core idea has stayed pretty much constant to the way we advise on technology and the technology industry. However, we’ve realised that the term ‘IT-business alignment’ – which we’ve used to try and explain our approach since 2005 – no longer really works for us.
Why? Because fundamentally, IT-business alignment isn’t something that anyone really thinks about directly. When things go well with IT and business change initiatives, as we found when we did the research for our Technology Garden book in 2007, improved IT-business alignment is a great side-effect; but there aren’t any “IT-business alignment improvement” projects out there.
We knew our main focus was still the right one for the company, but we needed to find a new way to crystallise that focus and make it more obvious.
Not entirely by coincidence, last year with the hiring of Helena Schwenk we had an opportunity to make a shift. We added another research programme to sit alongside our existing main programmes focused on BPM and Collaboration; this one focused on Analytics & Information Management. Now, we had three programmes which all inter-relate and inter-weave: one focused on people, one on process, and another on information. Three strands that you have to consider if you’re trying to drive business change and improvement.
Helena’s arrival has been the spark that’s enabled us to re-jig the way we explain our approach. Now, when you see us around, you won’t see “IT-business alignment analysts”. You’ll see “Helping you create business improvement from IT investment”. The same core principles we’ve always worked with continue: but hopefully more immediately obvious. That’s what we do through our research, analysis and consulting services: help organisations create improvement from IT investment.
So far the feedback from our clients has been very positive: the combination of interlinked research programmes focused on people, processes and information helps to support our position, too.
So, you may ask, why just call the blog “MWD’s Insights blog”? The answer’s simple – we tried loads of clever wordplay on change, improvement and so on – but decided to keep it simple.
Perhaps there’s something in that.
Posted in MWD
Pingback: Tweets that mention New post: Why we changed the name of our blog, and what it means for IT-business alignment -- Topsy.com