5 Impactful Elements That Promote IT and Business Alignment

Ask most IT leaders where their biggest headaches come from, and they’ll mention one thing almost immediately: the gap between what the business wants and what IT can deliver.

It’s a problem that shows up everywhere. A product team launches a new initiative without looping in infrastructure. Finance signs contracts for SaaS tools that don’t integrate with existing systems. Leadership sets a three-year digital strategy with no input from the people who have to build it. Then everyone wonders why the roadmap keeps slipping.

The disconnect between IT and business isn’t usually about capability. Both sides are often working hard. The problem is that they’re working toward slightly different versions of the same goal, with different vocabularies, different priorities, and different definitions of success.

IT-business alignment is the discipline of closing that gap — not by making IT more responsive to requests, but by integrating technology strategy into business strategy at the source. When it works well, IT isn’t reacting to the business; it’s shaping it.

McKinsey research shows that companies with strong IT-business alignment are 2.5 times more likely to achieve their strategic goals and grow revenue faster than industry peers.

Getting there isn’t a single initiative. It’s built from several overlapping elements that, together, shift how IT and business teams relate to each other. Here are five that consistently make the biggest difference.

1. A Shared Strategic Planning Process

Most organisations run IT planning and business planning as parallel processes that touch each other at the edges. Business sets priorities. IT gets handed a list and figures out how to execute. By the time IT leadership sees the full picture, some decisions are already locked in.

The shift that high-alignment organisations make is bringing IT into strategy conversations earlier — not just as an implementation voice, but as a contributor to what the strategy should be. When IT leaders understand the business direction before it’s finalised, they can flag where technology creates opportunity, where a plan will hit infrastructure limits, and where the sequencing of initiatives needs to change to be realistic.

This isn’t about IT having veto power over business decisions. It’s about ensuring that technology implications are part of the thinking, not an afterthought. In practice, it means IT leadership has a seat in executive planning sessions, not just programme review calls. It means technology roadmaps are built alongside business roadmaps, with shared assumptions about timelines, investment, and outcomes.

Gartner reports that only 40% of CIOs are involved in setting the enterprise strategy from the start. The other 60% are brought in after key decisions have already been made — and spend the rest of the year trying to catch up.

The fix is structural, not cultural. When joint planning is part of the annual calendar — not an optional add-on — alignment follows. Teams stop translating between two separate plans and start working from one.

What to focus on:

• Include CIO and senior IT leadership in executive strategy sessions from the first draft, not the final review.
• Build technology assumptions directly into business cases — costs, timelines, dependencies — before they go to leadership for approval.
• Create a shared planning calendar that synchronises business and IT roadmap reviews at least quarterly.

2. Shared Metrics and a Common Definition of Success

One of the clearest signs of misalignment is when IT and business teams measure success differently. IT reports on uptime, ticket resolution times, and sprint velocity. Business reports on revenue, customer acquisition, and margin. Both sets of numbers look fine. The company still isn’t moving fast enough.

The issue is that these metrics don’t talk to each other. They describe performance within each function, but they don’t say anything about whether technology investment is actually driving business outcomes. When the CFO asks whether the cloud migration delivered value, answering with infrastructure cost data and deployment speed isn’t the same as showing impact on customer experience or time-to-market for new products.

Shared metrics change this. Instead of IT reporting separately and business reporting separately, both functions report on the same outcomes — and take joint accountability for whether they’re achieved. A digital initiative has business owners and IT owners, both measured against the same success criteria.

According to PwC’s Digital IQ Survey, 72% of business executives say that unclear ownership of digital outcomes is one of the top reasons transformation programmes underperform.

This requires agreeing upfront — before a project starts — on what success looks like in business terms. Not “we launched the platform” but “we reduced customer onboarding time by 30% within six months.” Then both IT and business are working toward the same number, and both are accountable if it doesn’t land.

What to focus on:

• Define outcome-based KPIs for every major IT initiative — tied to business results, not just delivery milestones.
• Build joint scorecards that combine business and IT metrics into a single view reviewed by both leadership teams.
• Establish clear ownership of shared metrics so both sides feel responsible for outcomes, not just their own workstream.

3. Relationship Infrastructure — Not Just Project Governance

Most organisations have governance processes: steering committees, project sign-offs, change advisory boards. These structures matter, but they’re not the same as relationship infrastructure. Governance handles decisions. Relationships handle the space between decisions — the informal conversations where problems get surfaced early, where trust gets built, and where teams stop needing to send formal escalations for every small issue.

IT-business misalignment often has relational roots. Business stakeholders don’t fully trust IT to understand their domain. IT teams feel like they’re always being handed requirements rather than brought into problem-solving. Both sides have been let down enough times that they default to working around each other rather than with each other.

Business Relationship Managers (BRMs) — sometimes called IT relationship managers or business partners — are one structural answer to this. Their role is to sit between IT and business units, building deep understanding of what each business function actually needs, translating that into technology terms, and making sure IT initiatives are genuinely solving business problems rather than checking technical boxes.

Companies that deploy dedicated BRM roles report a 30–40% improvement in stakeholder satisfaction with IT services, according to the Business Relationship Management Institute.

But relationship infrastructure is broader than a job title. It includes regular touchpoints between IT and business teams that aren’t agenda-driven — lunch-and-learn sessions, joint retrospectives, cross-functional teams where IT and business staff work alongside each other on the same problem. Relationships that exist only inside formal governance structures tend to be transactional. You want relationships that exist independently of projects.

What to focus on:

• Establish BRM or technology liaison roles for major business units — people whose job is the relationship, not just the project.
• Create regular, low-stakes touchpoints between IT and business leadership — not just project reviews.
• Build cross-functional teams where IT and business colleagues work together, not in parallel.

4. Technology Literacy on Both Sides

Alignment breaks down when the two sides can’t really communicate with each other. Business leaders who have no feel for what technology actually involves will keep setting unrealistic timelines and underestimating complexity. IT teams who have no feel for the commercial realities of the business will keep building things that technically work but miss the point.

This isn’t about turning business leaders into engineers or IT staff into commercial directors. It’s about building enough shared vocabulary that conversations can happen without constant translation — and enough mutual understanding that both sides can challenge each other productively.

Digital literacy programmes for business leaders have become more common, but the impact varies enormously. The ones that work don’t teach technology for its own sake; they teach it in the context of the problems the business is actually trying to solve. What does cloud migration actually mean for how finance accesses data? What are the real implications of adopting AI in a customer-facing process? When business leaders can engage with those questions meaningfully, the quality of IT-business conversations gets dramatically better.

MIT Sloan research found that companies where senior leaders have strong digital literacy are 26% more profitable than peers — not because leaders write code, but because they make better technology investment decisions.

The same applies in reverse. IT teams that understand the commercial context of what they’re building — who the customer is, why a particular feature matters to revenue, what the competitive pressure looks like — make better architectural and prioritisation decisions. This is partly why embedding IT staff in business units, rather than running all IT centrally, tends to improve alignment. Proximity creates context.

What to focus on:

• Run business-relevant technology literacy programmes for senior leaders — focused on decisions and implications, not technical depth.
• Create opportunities for IT staff to spend time in business units — understanding the commercial and operational context of what they’re building.
• Build a shared vocabulary across teams. Simple things like glossaries, onboarding materials, and cross-functional working sessions reduce translation overhead significantly.

5. Agile Ways of Working That Cross Functional Boundaries

Traditional IT delivery models create alignment problems almost by design. Business writes a requirements document. IT disappears for months to build against it. The business changes. IT comes back with something that no longer quite fits. Both sides are frustrated. The cycle repeats.

Agile methodologies were partly a response to this — shorter cycles, faster feedback, working software over comprehensive documentation. But the alignment benefit of Agile is only realised when business stakeholders are genuinely part of the delivery process, not just consulted at the start and reviewed at the end.

The product owner role in a Scrum team is supposed to represent business priorities continuously throughout delivery — making real decisions about what gets built next, accepting or rejecting work, adjusting direction based on what’s been learned. When that role is filled by someone who actually has business authority and context, it works. When it’s filled by a proxy — a BA who has to escalate every decision back to the real stakeholders — the feedback loop breaks.

According to the State of Agile Report, 63% of organisations cite a lack of business engagement as the number one reason Agile transformations fail to deliver their expected value.

Cross-functional delivery teams — where product, technology, design, and commercial stakeholders work in the same team, toward the same goal, in the same sprint cycles — are one of the strongest structural enablers of alignment. They make misalignment visible immediately, because everyone can see when the work isn’t tracking toward the outcome they all agreed on.

This requires real commitment from business functions, not just IT. Business leaders need to be willing to put capable people into delivery teams and give them decision-making authority. That’s harder than it sounds when teams are stretched. But the alternative — IT building in isolation and business reviewing at the end — is more expensive than it looks.

What to focus on:

• Ensure product owner roles are filled by people with genuine business authority — not proxies who can’t make decisions.
• Build cross-functional delivery teams that include both IT and business stakeholders as active members, not just reviewers.
• Use short delivery cycles with regular business reviews — not to report progress, but to make real decisions about direction.

How Sthenos Supports IT-Business Alignment

The five elements above don’t happen on their own. They require changes to how organisations are structured, how they plan, how they measure, and how teams interact. For most enterprises, those changes are easier to make when there’s a partner who has navigated them before.

At Sthenos, we work with organisations at the intersection of technology strategy and delivery — helping leadership teams close the gap between what the business needs and what IT can realistically build. Whether that means running a technology strategy alignment workshop, designing cross-functional delivery structures, or embedding experienced technology leaders who can operate at both the business and technical level, our focus is on the outcomes that matter: faster decisions, less rework, and technology that actually moves the business forward.

Our CMMI Level 5-certified delivery approach means we bring process rigour to every engagement — but process in the service of business outcomes, not for its own sake. We’ve seen what misalignment costs at scale, and we’ve seen what the alternative looks like. The gap is always closeable.

Closing Thoughts

IT and business alignment is one of those topics that sounds like a management concept until you’re living with the consequences of not having it. Missed product launches. Transformation programmes that cost twice as much as planned. Technology investments that don’t show up in the P&L. These are the tangible outcomes of the gap.

The five elements here — shared planning, shared metrics, relationship infrastructure, mutual literacy, and cross-functional delivery — don’t require a big-bang transformation. Most organisations can make meaningful progress on one or two of them in the next quarter. The key is treating alignment as a structural discipline, not a communication problem.

Technology that’s built in close partnership with the business tends to work better, get adopted faster, and deliver more value. That’s not a coincidence. It’s what alignment is for.