How is Strategic Alignment Managed?

Strategic Alingment Within an Organisation
Sabine Mueller, Business Consultant, Austria
Of key Importance for the effort towards 'Strategic Aligment' is eficiency of communication and stakeholder management. All stakeholders need to know the strategic goals and how these goals will ultimately lead to a successful implementation of the strategic vision. Helpful are Strategy Maps and management of FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) to allow management to give a consistent response to queries and to develop a narrative for the implementation.

View Strategic Initiatives as Major Investments
Greg Githens, Coach, United States
Projects and programs can be viewed as investments by top management. Each strategic initiative is a deliberate choice by management, and the investment of resources should be made in a way that is aligned with Strategic Intent. The leaders of each strategic initiative - and team members - should know how their efforts contribute to the strategic intent.

Strategic Alignment Within an Organisation
Ken Gordon MBA PMP, Strategy Consultant, United Kingdom
There are many ways that 'Strategic Alignment' may be managed within an organisation. Most companies tend to utilise the concept of a strategic road map, one for each area of the company's operations feeding into a global view. These road maps highlight the path to implementation of the strategic development of the applications portfolio and underlying IT infrastructure.
Other companies are more sophisticated in the determination of their Strategic Alignment needs and make use frameworks such as Common Objectives Business and IT (COBIT), The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), or the Zachman Framework to determine the 'Strategic Alignment' needs of the organisation and to facilitate communications.
The application of the more formal methodologies will be more evident within organisations of scale where the IS/IT infrastructure is diversified and highly complex. The levels of complexity experienced requires a significant degree of management and control in order to ensure congruence in the development and deployment of applications and infrastructure, hence the application of the formal methodologies.

Strategic Alignment Within an Organisation
Ken Gordon MBA PMP, Strategy Consultant, United Kingdom
I would very much agree with Sabine that efficient and effective communications are of vital importance to the effort towards strategic alignment within an organisation. These aspects, of communication act, as the conduit (delivery) and the narrative(content) of the implementation. This is 'where the rubber meets the road'? Here is the place where effects easily lose their perceivable association with causes (Stacey 1993), 'the edge of equilibrium'?. The use of formal or informal frameworks will only be as effective as management's ability to continuously translate the strategic plans (both business and it) and their inherent complexities into communicable narrative.