Big Blue Bangs IT-Business Alignment Drum

For years companies have been told that unless they aligned IT with their business, they would find it harder to compete. Yet many companies continue to be indifferent to IT-business alignment, viewing IT as a cost center rather than a strategic resource.

IBM hopes to do its part to educate and assist its customers by announcing upgrades to its IBM Rational software family. From InternetNews.com:

The upgrades build on tools such as the IBM Rational Requirements Composer, announced late last year, that help companies track application development by tying together collaboration and logging software.

"Up until this point, organizations have been lax in measuring the business value and discipline of the processes they use to deliver software assets. Classic metrics in software engineering largely ignore the importance of actual business outcomes," Daniel Sabbah, general manager for IBM Rational Software, said in a statement.

"Our clients are now beginning to realize that the software they build or assemble must be treated as a strategic business asset. IBM is committed to helping them make the right decisions and improve the successful outcomes of this newly emerging business process discipline," he added.

Big Blue made the announcements at the 2009 Rational Software Conference in Orlando.

At the top of the IBM stack is IBM Rational Insight, which provides the dashboard to display data stored in and queried through IBM Cognos.

Specialized products serve specific needs. For example IBM Rational Focal Point for Project Management helps people work together at every level. "It empowers the CTO to make informed decisions about the projects they're working on, helping align the business strategy with real-time metrics through quantitative assessment," Dave Locke, director of marketing at IBM Rational, told InternetNews.com.

The software tracks requirements, replacing the guesswork of status meetings with real data, according to Locke. Instead of "relying on humans to put their finger in the wind and give assessments," the system uses data from the actual developer project.

"Data from the actual developer project" instead of fingers in the wind? Who runs businesses that way?