Business-IT Alignment

At écociel, we recognize the pervasive challenge of achieving effective collaboration between business units, software engineers, and infrastructure professionals. We have curated a collaboration approach that enables business and IT to gain shared clarity on critical aspects of digital product features. True alignment greatly reduces the top transformation risks: prohibitively high cloud cost, time to market delay, quality decline and extreme IT complexity. True alignment on a well articulated plan and desired outcome also empowers your organisation to drive external suppliers along your desired path.

Empowering collaborative synergy between business and IT

We have been involved at focal points of large transformation projects since 2010. We believe that the primary reason for dysfunctional transformations is the lack of a common language that allows both, business and IT to truly engage in the topics at hand. Such engagement however, is needed to evolve from the classic demand and supply relationship of business and IT to unified cross-functional teams.

Common Language

Common sense requires common language. Using a small set of concepts that can be equally understood by business and IT, cross functional teams can be guided into aligning on essential aspects of teh design and development of digital products.
Especially non-functional requirements such as target service level, scalability needs, or geographically varying legal implications greatly affect the systems design from the start. While they seem purely technical issues, they need to be understood by and indeed driven by the business side because they have, for example, cost implications.

Our approach enables business and IT to reach shared understanding and take informed decisions with clear expectations.

Decision Records

Having a defined language makes it possible to capture digital product design decisions in structured decision records. Such records do not only serve documentation purposes and allow capturing change using standard version control systems. They also are valuable artifacts for approval processes and for communication with software developers and infrastructure engineers.

There are also a number of opportunities to build tooling around the common language and decision records to leverage the model-based approach for automation.

Ready for a Change?

In our understanding true digital transformation is achieved when business and IT engage as a unit in the delivery of new digital capabilities for the digital value chain. We can help you to assess the status quo with a structured approach and, if desired, formulate a plan for incremental improvement.

Learn about our approach