http://www.citoresearch.com/it-management/using-question-game-businessit-alignment

One of the most important enduring challenges facing CITOs is making sure that the technology portfolio is aligned at all levels with the needs of the business. In my view, there is no secret to this. Alignment comes from awareness. Awareness comes from a sincere quest on the part of the CITO and the business executives to understand each other. Out of that awareness the best possible portfolio of applications and infrastructure can be created and gradually tuned and improved.

I think the key to business and IT alignment and the deeper challenge of business design is for the business to state its needs by setting forth questions. The process of declaring important questions must be continuous. My proposal is to make this process a game that I call the Question Game. Here’s how the game would work:        The CITO performs a survey of every line of business and the C-suite and asks them to set forth the questions that they most need answered to improve their performance.        The CITO would collect the questions and organize them according to their relevance to lines of business and key processes. It is likely that some questions will be applicable to many processes.        The business would then be asked to review the question and assign two rankings. One would be the dollar value to the answer to the question. The second, would be a ranking of the importance of the question relative to the other questions. The idea of the importance ranking is to surface questions that are important but don’t have a direct economic value.        At first, the question game would focus at a high level and would be played by the C-suite and heads of lines of business. But in subsequent iterations it could be played at all levels of an organization. Now imagine what the CITO would have when the first round of the game was over. The CITO would have a strong indication of exactly how to help the business.The CITO could then quickly see if there were a way to answer the questions that were high value and high importance. If budget were needed, it would be easy to find it, given that the business value of answering the question has been established.In other words, the Question Game frames the scope of the business design problem. The CITO won’t of course know everything needed to execute a design after a round of the game is done. The CITO will have to react in the following ways:        Look at the business processes related to the questions. Are they optimized? Can the be better supported? Should they be redesigned?        Look at supporting systems that are related to the questions. Can they be reconfigured or adapted to answer questions?        Look at the what new technology makes possible. Can investments in infrastructure or applications help answer lots of questions? Remember that the questions can be about information or about automation. “How can I know” questions are about information. “How can I do” questions are about automation.

One of the most important enduring challenges facing CITOs is making sure that the technology portfolio is aligned at all levels with the needs of the business. In my view, there is no secret to this. Alignment comes from awareness. Awareness comes from a sincere quest on the part of the CITO and the business executives to understand each other. Out of that awareness the best possible portfolio of applications and infrastructure can be created and gradually tuned and improved. - See more at: http://www.citoresearch.com/it-management/using-question-game-businessit-alignment#sthash.YloBSrvp.dpuf