Surprise! IS alignment, informal structure does work too!

I am Chinese. Undeniably, I shared the common culture values with my compatriots. Even though I was brought up under colonial rule, I was born to be thinking in holistic and contextual way. So, no surprise, if I naturally equally weighted IS strategic alignment and structural alignment for any company, many of my fellow classmates would agree with me. I basically believe a proper formal IS structure is a prerequisite of success. It is a bit Confucian style.

However, research study and experiences told me that informal structure did work too. Dr. Yolande E. Chan (2002) of Queen’s University finds a strong trend that IS strategic alignment may be more important than the alignment of formal business units and IS structures. Comparing with strategic alignment, fewer preconditions to IS structural alignment were always present.

The argument put forward by Dr. Yolande seems quite strong when I search my memory. There was no CTO in the ecommerce project I had worked for. A consultant, a close friend of CEO, took in charge of whole group IT/IS strategy. The empowerment of the consultant is not merely coming from his relationship with CEO but also his extraordinary performance in the IT field and business sense. His name was never shown in the organizational structure. However, he acted proactively in interacting with all business units within the company and aligned IS strategy with a clear business direction especially in outsourcing IT works strategically. When the time we were encountering trust problem in virtual team working, he dedicated his fervor in lining up distributed teams and building up personal trust relationships among IS personnel. So, IS personnel were all clear about their roles.

Honestly speaking, sometimes, I felt a bit puzzle about how a guy without proper position in a company could get through hurdles, especially when confronting COO and CFO. A success from IS strategic alignment may help to explain most. Culturally, I still doubt about that sort of structure. Practically, I learnt from that.

Reference:

“Why haven’t we mastered alignment? The importance of the informal organization structure”, Dr. Yolande E. Chan from Queen’s University (2002).