This course addresses the importance of aligning the firm organization culture, innovation, infrastructure architecture, and knowledge capture with their strategic plan. It is based on the trend in industry that requires successful organizations to continuously identify and respond to many ongoing market opportunities simultaneously. To be an organization that is agile, flexible, creative and knowledgeable enough to do so is no small achievement.

Strategic alignment refers to the degree to which the business strategy plans, and the IT strategy plans, complement each other. This is significant in showing the need for IT and business strategic alignment in order to achieve customer-driven business.

The Organizational Alignment portion covers how aligning a firm’s cultural behaviors to its strategic business objectives influences its product architecture and organizational structures to improve performance.

Organizational culture consists of instinctive, repetitive, habits and emotional responses. It includes self-sustaining patterns of behavior used to define how work gets done at a firm. It survives and evolves mostly through gradual shifts in leadership, strategy, and other considerations like symbolic reminders (slogans, top-down messages, and artifacts geared at stating the firm’s cultural goals), keystone behaviors (recurring acts that trigger other behaviors), and mind sets (attitudes and beliefs that are widely shared but invisible).

Communications is an excellent example. If we align our communications to further our cultural behaviors, such as adopting social media techniques, then we may impact the organization’s product architecture that we need in place to support our operations.