Business must align with IT, says Vodafone Qatar CIO

This month's CIO UK Debate is the result of a conversation the editorial team had with Adrian Dilworth, the CIO of Vodafone Qatar, the latest network launched by global mobile operator. Dilworth enjoys challenging assumed attitudes and comes at the issue of alignment of IT with the business from a very different angle; he believes that in many cases the business should align with IT.

This radically different view is based on experience, Dilworth insisted in the set up of Vodafone Qatar that there would be no customisation to the Oracle applications. In acquiring the Oracle telecoms set of applications he believes he bought in best practice methods for Vodafone and teams around the business should, and have, aligned their methods with the applications. The results have been successful. Vodafone is a CIO 100 ranked company.

Dilworth was unable to join the original CIO UK Debate with CIOs Rorie Devine and Ian Dobb, but penned his own thoughts below:

I personally regard IT aligning with the business as a shared responsibility that goes both ways. Generally alignment takes a serious amount of work. I have many times seen people who mistake "agreement" for "alignment", or even "communication" for "alignment". Real alignment need to be done at multiple levels and that includes getting down to resources, budget, schedule or priority to deliver it.

The second point of alignment is that you can burn large amounts of time to little effect trying to achieve alignment across large organisations. Organisations are built out of people who will naturally have all sorts of opinions and views. Expecting to align and get agreement with everyone is complete folly. Good organisations should have effective processes that ensure alignment, if not, start by booking an hour with the CEO and work down. You will achieve the result you want a lot quicker than pursuing a "general consensus" approach.