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Business and technology alignment, or just technology alignment, corrects terminology and assumptions used in business to better match those of technology and standards anticipated in the technology strategy and technology roadmaps. [1]
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When technology is changing very rapidly in an industry, the aligning of business terms to the distinctions that the technology requires tends to dominate any enterprise taxonomy development effort. In such circumstances, consultants or specific technology training is usually required, as the organization lacks the internal skills or experience with the technologies that it expects to be using soon.
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In government, for example, citizen use of the Internet and the increased availability of remote work has presented special challenges and opportunities, typically called "e-government". At the same time, internal operational efficiencies have become more of a priority due to rising competition between jurisdictions. Often the first step is to limit the number of different departments or agencies involved. By "consolidating the technology operations of 91 state agencies into the Virginia Information Technology Agency, the State of Virginia estimates an eventual savings of nearly $100 million a year." -
"Similarly, the U.S. National Performance Review recommended a data processing consolidation and modernization initiative citing industry experience suggesting operational savings of between 30% and 50%." -
While "California is the cradle of the information technology industry" its own state government claims that "collaborative exploration and exploitation of emerging technologies is extremely rare within state government", accordingly it seeks to "improve customer relationships through online services." However such efforts tend to rely very much on driving personalities and leadership. After one resignation, the state "lost the vision and executive sponsorship that contributed to its success and the national recognition of California's emerging eGovernment activities." This is a major problem in all technology alignment.
In Canada, a similar nationwide effort called Service Canada has similar goals, and has run into similar problems: "The big complaints are that departments fight over their turf and are organized to serve the bureaucracy, not Canadians. They don’t share data, information, common infrastructure, technology or integrate their business processes. Senior bureaucrats are often accused of being out of touch with the needs of Canadians." - The government claims that it "is expected to save C$3 billion over five years by automating manual operations, consolidating call centres and reducing overpayments in Canada Pension Plan and employment service." It "will need to spend about C$500 million for technology, consolidate or move offices and retrain the thousands of workers whose jobs were eliminated by automation."
When, as in California or Canada, new leadership and massive change to operations is required, technology alignment may simply excuse a massive business process reengineering and downsizing exercise. This too is a common situation in technology alignment: using the fact of new technology as a pretext for other large changes.
However, as with all such exercises, there are claims that better service will result, by (in Canada) "opening new offices and creating more front-line jobs in local communities" or (in California) "a 20% reduction in the workforce performing shared services" and of "nearly 9,000 state employees... about 3,600 are engaged in common core functions. An eventual 20% reduction in this workforce segment is possible through attrition when phased in over 5 years." -
These claims also are fairly typical: despite a longstanding admission among experts that there is a "productivity paradox", the introduction of new information technology and more automated work processes are always assumed to be "more efficient" than what they replace. Accordingly, technology alignment is probably not a passing fad, but, seems to be driven by factors built into business and technology culture.
A privacy policy is a statement or legal document that discloses some or all of the ways a party gathers, uses, discloses, and manages a customer or client's data. Personal information can be anything that can be used to identify an individual, not limited to the person's name, address, date of birth, marital status, contact information, ID issue, and expiry date, financial records, credit information, medical history, where one travels, and intentions to acquire goods and services. In the case of a business, it is often a statement that declares a party's policy on how it collects, stores, and releases personal information it collects. It informs the client what specific information is collected, and whether it is kept confidential, shared with partners, or sold to other firms or enterprises. Privacy policies typically represent a broader, more generalized treatment, as opposed to data use statements, which tend to be more detailed and specific.
Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aims to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors.
Shared services is the provision of a service by one part of an organization or group where that service had previously been found in more than one part of the organization or group. Thus the funding and resourcing of the service is shared and the providing department effectively becomes an internal service provider. The key here is the idea of 'sharing' within an organization or group. This sharing needs to fundamentally include shared accountability of results by the unit from where the work is migrated to the provider. The provider, on the other hand, needs to ensure that the agreed results are delivered based on defined measures.
Systems management refers to enterprise-wide administration of distributed systems including computer systems. Systems management is strongly influenced by network management initiatives in telecommunications. The application performance management (APM) technologies are now a subset of Systems management. Maximum productivity can be achieved more efficiently through event correlation, system automation and predictive analysis which is now all part of APM.
A federal enterprise architecture framework (FEAF) is the U.S. reference enterprise architecture of a federal government. It provides a common approach for the integration of strategic, business and technology management as part of organization design and performance improvement.
A purchasing cooperative is a type of cooperative arrangement, often among businesses, to agree to aggregate demand to get lower prices from selected suppliers. Retailers' cooperatives are a form of purchasing cooperative. Cooperatives are often used by government agencies to reduce costs of procurement. Purchasing Cooperatives are used frequently by governmental entities, since they are required to follow laws requiring competitive bidding above certain thresholds. In the United States, counties, municipalities, schools, colleges and universities in the majority of states can sign interlocal agreements or cooperative contracts that allow them to legally use contracts that were procured by another governmental entity. The National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) reported increasing use of cooperative purchasing practices in its 2016 survey of state procurement.
An automated storage and retrieval system consists of a variety of computer-controlled systems for automatically placing and retrieving loads from defined storage locations. Automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) are typically used in applications where:
IT portfolio management is the application of systematic management to the investments, projects and activities of enterprise Information Technology (IT) departments. Examples of IT portfolios would be planned initiatives, projects, and ongoing IT services. The promise of IT portfolio management is the quantification of previously informal IT efforts, enabling measurement and objective evaluation of investment scenarios.
The California Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) is a department within the California Business, Consumer Services, and Housing Agency. DCA's stated mission is to serve the interests of California's consumers by ensuring a standard of professionalism in key industries and promoting informed consumer practices. The DCA provides the public with information on safe consumer practices, in an effort to protect the public from unscrupulous or unqualified people who promote deceptive products or services.
System integration is defined in engineering as the process of bringing together the component sub-systems into one system and ensuring that the subsystems function together as a system, and in information technology as the process of linking together different computing systems and software applications physically or functionally, to act as a coordinated whole.
A vendor management system (VMS) is an Internet-enabled, often Web-based application that acts as a mechanism for business to manage and procure staffing services – temporary, and, in some cases, permanent placement services – as well as outside contract or contingent labor. Typical features of a VMS application include order distribution, consolidated billing and significant enhancements in reporting capability that outperforms manual systems and processes.
An integration competency center (ICC), sometimes referred to as an integration center of excellence (COE), is a shared service function providing methodical data integration, system integration, or enterprise application integration within organizations, particularly large corporations and public sector institutions.
The Air Traffic Organization (ATO) is an air navigation service provider in the United States of America. The ATO is the operational division of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business processes is BPM. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, enabling technologies are often used with BPM.
The Michigan Department of Technology, Management & Budget (DTMB), formerly Michigan Department of Management and Budget, is a principal department of the government of Michigan responsible for various support functions within the government.
The Distributed Common Ground System(DCGS) is a system which produces military intelligence for multiple branches of the American military.
The United States Army Information Technology Agency (ITA) is one of the administrative service organizations aligned under the Office of the Administrative Assistant to the Secretary of the Army (OAA). OAA has three fundamental functions. The primary mission of the organization is to provide direct support to the Secretary of the Army and other Army political appointees. The second mission is to provide administrative support to the Headquarters, Department of the Army (HQDA). The third mission is to provide base operations support to a diverse group of Army and Department of Defense (DoD) customers. OAA is organized into four major divisions: the U.S. Army Resources and Programs Agency (RPA), the U.S. Army Headquarters Services (AHS), the U.S. Army Information Technology Agency (ITA), and the U.S. Army Center of Military History (CMH). These divisions support OAA primarily in areas of IT, logistics, training, and human resources support.
The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act made changes to the ways the U.S. federal government buys and manages computer technology. It became law as a part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015 (Title VIII, Subtitle D, H.R. 3979.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a form of business process automation that is based on software robots (bots) or artificial intelligence (AI) agents. RPA should not be confused with artificial intelligence as it is based on automotive technology following a predefined workflow. It is sometimes referred to as software robotics.
Intelligent automation (IA), or alternately intelligent process automation, is a software term that refers to a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA). Companies use intelligent automation to cut costs and streamline tasks by using artificial-intelligence-powered robotic software to mitigate repetitive tasks. As it accumulates data, the system learns in an effort to improve its efficiency. Intelligent automation applications consist of but are not limited to, pattern analysis, data assembly, and classification. The term is similar to hyperautomation, a concept identified by research group Gartner as being one of the top technology trends of 2020.
