IT, CIOs are steadily suggested, must be aligned with the enterprise, and alignment, we’re advised, is usually a matter of efficient IT governance.

Alignment is best than misalignment, I suppose, however in the long run it’s weak tea. Add overreliance on IT governance because the means for reaching it and also you flip IT right into a stifling, choking forms, not a simpler group.

What’s the superior various? Focusing your efforts on integrating IT into the enterprise, not simply aligning IT with it. That’s integration, as in taking all of the steps obligatory for IT to be, and to be perceived as being, integral to each facet of the enterprise.

That’s the topic of this primary article in a sequence I’ll be rolling out over the following few months known as “Constructing efficient IT 101.”