CIOs: Business Alignment And BT Enablement Require Business Capability Maps

CIOs are aggressively tackling their planning and management challenges, deploying tools and building models to address a wide variety of functions like asset management, IT services management, application rationalization, business process efficiencies, and business services management. But these tools each solve only an isolated part of the CIO's planning and management puzzle, and they fail to address business and IT complexities. A growing number of smart CIOs are using business capability maps — high-level models that link a small number of key business capabilities to IT's services. These maps work even when IT has no direct control over the technology, bring a business-value point of view to a wide variety of discussions, and add sufficient incremental value to motivate their ongoing use. CIOs should adopt business capability maps in addition to their other models, updating the maps as part of IT and business change processes and referencing the maps every time IT and the business seek a high-level point of view.