The ISR, Heinz and LTI Department Welcome:

David Shpilberg
Vice Chairman of CPM Braxis
Senior Advisor to Bain & Co

Thursday, September 27, 2007, 3pm
NSH 3305

Avoiding the Alignment Trap in IT


ABSTRACT:

Information technology remains a terrible bottleneck to growth in most
companies, mainly because executives focus on the wrong remedy for
their IT problems. The good news is that is that the problem can be
fixed by focusing first on the effectiveness of IT in the
organization, not in its alignment with business.

Most companies today try to improve their IT performance by focusing
on the organizational alignment of  IT, making sure that IT and
business priorities are tightly linked, that  IT spending supports the
company's growth strategies, and that  there is shared ownership of IT
projects. All that is very important, but focusing on those issues
before improving the effectiveness of the IT organization,
infrastructure and systems, can actually make the problem worse.

IT underperformance is most often rooted not just in misalignment but
in the excessive complexity of systems, applications and technology
infrastructure.

Complexity doesn't disappear just because an IT organization learns to
focus on aligned projects rather than less aligned ones. On the
contrary, it usually gets worse. Non-standard solutions designed to
serve each business's unique needs proliferate,  making system
enhancements and infrastructure improvements ever more difficult to
implement. Costs rise, delays mount, and the fragmentation and lack of
standardization makes it more difficult for managers to coordinate
across business units. 

Aligning an under-performing IT organization more closely to the
businesses it supports, will make the problem worse. That, in a
nutshell, is the alignment trap.


Bio:

David Shpilberg is Vice Chairman of CPM Braxis, a global information
technology company in Brazil.  He is also a Senior Advisor to Bain &
Company, Inc. and the former head of Bain's IT Services information
technology practice worldwide. 
	
David has over 30 years of consulting and management experience,
having worked with companies in the financial services, consumer
products and transportation industries.  He focuses on helping
companies utilize information technology (IT) more effectively, in
order to achieve higher levels of profitability and growth.

He is experienced in business and IT strategy, business and IT
management, IT and business process outsourcing, IT enabled growth,
product development, software development, and artificial
intelligence.  Some of the largest on-line brokerage firms, securities
firms, banks, financial information providers and electronic exchanges
are among his clients.