Framework for Communication and Visualization of IT and Business Alignment for Financial Institution

Abstract

It is of a great importance for financial institutions to achieve business and IT alignment. It allows the business to focus on its core function and gives IT department an opportunity to concentrate on providing insights on how technology can help business in developing new capabilities. Achieving such alignment will require IT management and IT employees to possess sufficient business understanding of their core operations and business managers to acquire certain level of technical proficiency of IT solutions used in their organizations. This approach requires that the organization develops and fosters communication platform between business and IT as well as among different IT departments. We believe that such communication approach based on a four-level framework is the most versatile and also the most promising one. This paper defines such communication framework for financial institutions by determining the elements of the communication process and drawing relations between this process, organizational culture and other existing, best-practice Information Management frameworks. Additionally, we stress the importance of the visual representation in communicating complex strategic, organizational and technologically oriented subjects. As an important part of the framework, based on our experience, we define guidelines which address general communication and visualization problems faced by an organization when bridging business and IT perspectives on the alignment challenge. This paper concludes with a presentation of a successful implementation of such a framework at a financial institution.