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The Nuts and Bolts of Alignment

The Nuts and Bolts of Alignment

IT-business alignment.Business buy-in.Business sponsors for IT projects. CIO checks out eight IT projects to see if it's just ‘yadda, yadda, yadda' or if business and IT are walking the talk together

Aurora Energy

Nature of Project: Implementation of document and records management software from Hummingbird.

Business Users: Finance.

Project Leader: Andrea Sund, project manager.

Aurora Energy, a Tasmanian company whose core business is the distribution and retailing of electricity, recently purchased documents and record management software to provide employees and agents with the information they need, when they need it.

Sund says the process of achieving alignment was helped by the fact that the information management (IM) team works out of the finance and business group, which in turn has stewardship of company information. IT is responsible for IT infrastructure and ensuring systems work properly, and the finance and business group is responsible for content. The IM team and the business users worked together from the beginning on identifying business needs and the impact on users.

"As part of the evaluation process, we involved the end users together with representatives from the business and technology sectors in the selection committee," Sund says. "We have a current information management system in the business that we knew wasn't working. It was identified that we needed to change, the whole business was then not informed but rather workshopped to keep them informed so that the whole change management process started then, right at the beginning."

Since a new information management system would likely transform Aurora's entire method of managing information, including the way it was saved, identified and stored for retrieval, consultation began with an examination of existing methods and how they would change. Business representatives were also involved in vendor software demonstrations and had some input into the selection process. Aurora's IT service providers and a member of the IT group have also been involved from the beginning.

"We're at prototype stage at the moment," Sund says, "but [we're] confident IT has an excellent understanding at this stage of exactly what's required from a solution."

City of Canada Bay

Nature of Project: Suite of new business applications.

Business Users: Across the spectrum.

Project Leader: Nic Pasternatski, director, information services.

City of Canada Bay was born from the merger of two inner-west Sydney metropolitan councils - Concord and Drummoyne - both of which had existing legacy information systems and their own set of business processes. Defining requirements for a new set of business systems applications for the new council entailed looking at all processes to see how they could be improved. "We didn't want to carry over what the individual councils did in the past: we would re-examine the position of the former two councils and see if we could do it better," Pasternatski says.

"As a result, we came up with a new business systems tender where we in fact tendered for all the different applications that councils required. That meant that we had to get a new financial management system; we had to get a new Land Information System; we had to get a new HR payroll system; we had to get a new electronic document management system; we had to look at our customer request management system; we had to, in fact, look at our business papers system - how we produced our agendas for council meetings, committee meetings and the like.

"A new business systems committee went through and came up with all the specifications for all these applications that the new council required," Pasternatski says. The committee comprised key users from every aspect of the business, key managers, key directors and the then general manager, as well as IT.

The committee made presentations of the various applications to staff as part of the tender evaluation process, involving other key users and getting input on how every function of the new application would affect users. "We looked at business change right from the start, because we would do things very differently," Pasternatski says.

The council has adopted a big bang approach to implementation, squeezing a six-month implementation into just three months. To manage the massive change the project team appointed "module champions" from wherever the appropriate expertise could be found in the business to ensure all the tasks the team had committed to do were actually done during implementation.

"In terms of all the applications, you need people to drive the process," Pasternatski says. "Once you agree on something that has to be done as a group, you need champions in various areas so the application doesn't drive you, you drive the application - the application has to work to the benefit of the organisation."

It also appointed project managers for every application, and - as mentioned above - relied on outside consultants to press unpalatable messages on users.

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