Exploring the Intersection between Business and IT: the LEF Research Approach
30 December 2009
There are a great many sources of information technology research, advice, consulting and analysis. That so many people and organizations can thrive by thinking, writing and speaking about our business is testament to IT’s importance, vitality and ever-changing nature. The information technology industry is constantly re-inventing even its most fundamental building blocks, while at the same time taking on an ever-more-ambitious business and societal agenda. The result for the enterprise IT function is an ever-changing decision-making agenda for which outside expertise and insight are often sought.
Within any complex industry ecosystem, individual firms tend to become more specialized over time, as they seek to nurture a sustainable market position. The IT industry is one of the best examples of this tendency, as literally hundreds of thousands of specialized hardware, software and services companies compete all around the world. Similarly, the IT research and consulting community is also highly specialized, with countless firms focusing on particular technologies, applications and/or issues. Everyone seeks their own area of advantage.
The Leading Edge Forum has – as far as we know – a unique twist on this specialization in that our focus is on a single, but very broad, issue: we seek, at a holistic level, to understand the ever-expanding intersection between business and IT. Large enterprises and information technology are becoming increasingly intertwined, and we believe there is an ongoing need to assess this integration and identify emerging business/IT next practices for the CIO (and increasingly the CXO) at a practical level that is largely independent of suppliers, technologies and specific implementation issues.
Over the last few years, we have been putting this strategy and service into place. This paper provides an overview of our thinking and the choices we are making so that clients can better understand the nature of our offerings as well as our plans for 2010, and beyond. The intersection of business and IT is a complex topic that spans the strategy, management and culture of the firm. In order to provide clients with the forward-thinking models, frameworks and advice they seek, we determined that we needed to have an integrated set of ongoing work in the six subject domains shown in the figure. Each is briefly described below.
