10 Business Allignment Techniques for Organizational Success

Updated September 30, 2022

Successfully aligned businesses often have an easier time implementing their development strategies, encouraging productivity and increasing the efficiency of their operations. Learning effective business alignment techniques, like using analytics to inform new initiatives and improving communication strategies, can help businesses accomplish their goals and unify their teams. By developing your methods, you can better align the various areas of your business toward a shared vision of success.

In this article, we explain what business alignment and business-IT alignment are, list 10 business alignment techniques, discuss the difference between business intelligence and analytics in alignment and offer examples of other key alignment types.

What is business alignment?

Business alignment refers to a process organizations use to improve collaboration across the different areas of their organization and streamline their business efforts. By strategically aligning their operations, companies can remove inefficiencies, coordinate an approach that achieves their long-term goals and better support their various business functions. For these reasons, companies often prioritize their efforts to employ alignment strategies and improve efficiency across their organization. With each area aligned toward common goals, like customer retention, improved productivity and increased profit, businesses can promote positive outcomes and enjoy optimized functionality.

When the different departments of an organization work together, they often increase the business's ability to fulfill its mission and promote its values, ensuring the long-term viability of the company.

Related: What Is Business Alignment?

What is business-IT alignment?

Business-IT alignment means businesses engage in coordinated efforts with their IT departments to accomplish shared goals. One of the most important ways for businesses to improve efficiency and achieve long-term goals is to establish a relationship between IT and business development. With improved communication between technology teams and business leadership, companies can better align strategies between their departments and drive performance.

Working together, the different business areas can help one another remain innovative, efficient and mutually supported. IT teams can deliver powerful technology solutions, respond quickly to technical issues and help implement analytic tools that deliver meaningful intelligence and further promote alignment goals. Realizing the power of these technology professionals and focusing on strategies for aligning efforts allows businesses to benefit and learn from the technological expertise of their IT professionals.

Business alignment techniques

If you're interested in improving alignment strategies within your own business, here are some techniques you can use:

1. Realize the power of analytics

Data can offer meaningful insight into the effectiveness of current strategies and the viability of proposed solutions. By using analytics in your business processes, you can better analyze different aspects of your operations and find worthy opportunities for increased alignment. Developing analytics-based initiatives allows companies to use data effectively and gain valuable insight. To do this, create quantifiable goals you can measure.

For example, growing a customer base, increasing output or raising the success rates of your sales efforts are all measurable goals that analytics can help you improve. By developing key performance indicators (KPIs) you can better determine the effectiveness of your strategies and focus your efforts toward worthwhile initiatives. Work with IT teams to ensure you're fully applying all the capabilities of your analytics software.

2. Identify overlap

Another technique for improved business alignment is performing a thorough analysis that checks for redundancies in your operations. By identifying areas of overlap, you can remove inefficiencies within your organization. Paying for multiple software subscriptions that perform the same function or having two positions within separate departments that do the same work are examples of overlap you might encounter in your business.

3. Establish core values

One key way to align all your departments is to establish company core values. Doing this makes it easier for everyone to understand what your mission is as a company, which can help you promote common values among departments and ensure everyone is working toward shared objectives. Communicate your core values and make them central to your operations. When everyone understands the priorities of the business, they're more likely to align in their efforts to operate within set standards and expectations.

4. Improve communication

Communication is one of the best ways you can improve efficiency within your company and better align your teams toward common goals and initiatives. If you're ready to incorporate new strategies into your operations, guarantee everyone within your company understands both the short- and long-term business goals. Develop channels that make it possible for everyone to learn of updates or adjusted priorities quickly, especially your leadership teams. Frequently meeting and connecting with decision-makers and managers can help you ensure everyone within your organization has access to important information.

5. Develop successful managers

Your company's leaders have immense power in ensuring your alignment strategies come to fruition. Developing successful managers who understand the company's goals, communicate well with their teams and value the organization's efforts can help companies promote their values and reliably develop their strategies. Promote strong communicators with innovative ideas and work to develop their collaboration with other managers in your leadership team.

6. Help employees feel valued

Implementing new strategies often requires the help of everyone within the organization. Employees who feel trusted, supported and valued are typically better equipped to create a community with a shared purpose. Corporate culture can have a significant effect on an organization's ability to develop new strategies and improve processes. Try to support the culture of your company by incorporating employee incentives and establishing channels for employee feedback.

7. Ensure understanding of company goals

Businesses are most successful when everyone at the company understands the values and goals of the organization. If you plan to improve your business alignment by updating your leadership structure, reporting techniques or communication channels, ensure everyone understands what you plan to do and what the goals are. This can reduce confusion and improve employees' willingness to support long-term goals.

8. Build stronger relationships

To create a greater sense of cohesion within your departments, consider finding opportunities for meaningful collaboration. There may be ways the different aspects of your business can support one another and accomplish shared goals. Building relationships makes it easier for teams to improve the communication between departments and discover more of these opportunities.

9. Establish reliable metrics

Another strategy for better business alignment is to establish reliable metrics. Developing reliable KPIs and staying consistent with the metrics you collect can improve the value of your data and give you reliable intelligence capable of delivering real insight into your company's performance. This is a key area where businesses need to work together with their technology teams to ensure initiatives are serving company goals. Establish metrics that allow leadership and IT teams to determine how well metrics are helping them support the business's operations.

10. Reevaluate often

The goal of successful business alignment techniques is to help companies establish ongoing strategies for efficiency and optimization. As businesses grow, needs change and technology advances, businesses may need to adjust their goals to respond to both internal and external changes. Staying adaptable and objective can help you ensure you're always promoting the best strategies and ideas for your organization.

Surveys, market research and communication between teams are three ways you can help evaluate the current effectiveness of your initiatives. If you find there are areas of your business not performing at the standard you'd like, you can adjust your techniques to better reflect the needs of your organization.

Business intelligence vs. analytics in alignment

Business intelligence (BI) and analytics are two important aspects of business alignment, but they are not the same. BI relies on past and present operational and managerial reporting to determine the current effectiveness of business strategies, processes and initiatives. BI is very important for businesses and can help them measure progress and assess the performance of their business functions.

Business analytics (BA) goes a little further. Rather than relying on data comparisons between current measurements and past reports, BA incorporates a software element that can predict future success. BA is a powerful tool for companies and it can make their alignment strategies more innovative and forward-thinking. To increase the capability of business data, companies can apply alignment techniques like establishing reliable metrics and defining their data requirements. While companies can use BA software to derive important BI metrics, it's more expensive than traditional reporting techniques and doesn't help businesses capitalize on the full range of BA's offerings.

Other types of alignment

Here are some other types of alignment businesses can focus on improving:

Strategy

Strategic alignment refers to the processes businesses use to develop and implement methods aimed at supporting their organizational objectives. When a business achieves strategic alignment, their projects, teams and business functions all support the company's mission. By working in unison and having a shared commitment to company-wide strategies and goals, different areas of the company can all promote a unified vision.

Communication

Aligning communication goals and expectations can be very important for business success. Effective communication within a company ensures equal understanding of the company's vision, allows teams to build stronger relationships and improves an organization's ability to find synergy within its various business areas. To better align their communication efforts, businesses can develop channels for improved information delivery, like surveys and increased face-to-face meetings.

Resources

Resource alignment means that a company is allocating its resources efficiently. By fully utilizing tools and removing redundancies, businesses can make better use of their resources and optimize their processes. Improved collaboration between departments can help team leaders discover ways to use their resources more effectively and capitalize on existing business capabilities.