The unique bundling across technology and business processes (functional process definition as well as operations delivery) in Business Platforms entails cross functional decision making between the CIO and the business owner ( typically COO’s or functional owners such as CPO’s, HR directors, and Financial controllers). There is also another cross-functional decision making between multiple business owners. For e.g, in the case of a Procure-to-Pay Platform, where procurement and AP owners have to align to take an integrated view; or end-to-end Hire-to-Retire, where individual HR function owners need to align. I will cover this in a separate blog entry, and will restrict this entry to discussing alignment between the CIO and business owner.
In my interactions with customers, I have often encountered a dichotomy in alignment between CIO’s and business owners. In most cases, while the business owners view this as a great model to help achieve their business objectives and want to take a technology agnostic view, CIO’s view this as a model that interferes with their organizational technology strategy and feel a loss of ownership and control. This leads to organizations being unable to take a holistic business view, and lose out on a unique opportunity that could be a win-win for both the business owners as well as CIO’s.
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