Forrester has long advocated adoption of a “business technology” approach to replace traditional IT. “BT” recognizes the fundamental role information technology plays in all aspects of business – and the need for business decision-makers to be deeply involved in setting technology strategy, priorities, and even delivering solutions. But how does this tight coupling of business and technology decision-making actually work?

My colleague Alexander Peters and I have just witnessed a situation that illustrates that having the right organizational structure and technology-savvy businesspeople is crucial to a BT transition.

The organization developed an IT strategy 10 years ago based on three best practices:

1. Major business processes would be implemented on a single, modern, flexible platform.

2. The platform would employ SOA to ensure that it could adapt to unforeseen needs.

3. The platform would run in the consolidated, scalable, and efficient data center of a service provider.

Today, the organization has not yet achieved its top goal of a single platform for all of its major processes. It has a new SOA/Java environment, but it processes a little more than half of the required workload. Older systems do the rest. Most disturbing:

• The development investment has been many times greater than expected at the outset.

• The annual cost of IT operations doubled versus the baseline.

• System reliability went down with the new environment.