Ram Duraiswamy, Vice President of IT Governance Strategy at Mercury, has a thought provoking post at Mercury's new blog. Early in his post he writes:

Everyone and their mothers have a free piece of advise for corporate IT. ...'Run IT like a business'...

That is Motherhood and Apple Pie in my humble opinion.

I agree with Ram, but I would not have thought of characterizing it that way. Why does this turn out to be pie in the sky stuff? In my opinion, it has to do with both having discipline and executing. Sure technology can be pretty complex, but will, fortitude, and leadership play a big role, especially for companies that have the horses to run with.

Ram has a good diagram to go with his post too as he drives deeper to reveal the alignment challenges when working through both business and IT aspects across process, controls, and visibility. He relates a telling discussion he had with one CIO:

Visibility. CEO's and CFO's get real-time financials, booking and billing information from executive dashboards. I asked the CIO of a multi-billion dollar apparel manufacturer, "If you were to account for every resource in your organization about what they are working on. How do you get that information?" His response was, "Oh yes, we do that exercise twice a year as part of our IT planning cycle. I basically have to give 5 days off for all of my direct reports ... for them to go compile that information."

Steve Shu