The debate over the need for business and IT units to work together to leverage enterprises’ bottom line is not new, but it has recently gained importance as the global pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation.

Looking to bridge the gap between technology investments and business results, a coalition of software industry leaders and executives, known as the BizOps Coalition, this week launched the BizOps Manifesto, presented as a framework to address the problem.

“In many ways, the BizOps concept and the BizOps Manifesto are around bringing together a number of ideas which have been emerging in the last five years or so and defining the key values and principles to finally help these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses,” said Serge Lucio (pictured), general manager of the Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom Inc. and an author of the BizOps Manifesto.

Lucio spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the BizOps Manifesto Unveiled event. They discussed surveys that show the disconnect between business and IT, how enterprises can improve the integration of these two teams, the metrics that both units could share, and the values and principles of the BizOps Manifesto. (* Disclosure below.)

Disconnect between IT and business is costly

Leaders across industries have learned that too often software investments are not tied to business outcomes.

A survey conducted by Project Management Institute reveals that companies around the globe collectively waste about $1 million every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not generate business value. This equates to roughly $2 trillion dollars wasted per year.

In another survey, sponsored by Broadcom and conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, about 77% of respondents said that the disconnect between IT and business units results in significant costs. This disconnect is also the number one digital transformation challenge for these executives.

“And that has been kind of the case for almost 20 years now. So, the key challenge we are faced with is really that we need a new approach,” Lucio stated.

One aspect that needs to change to align business and IT is how technology units are perceived in organizations. They have been treated as a cost center and not a value center, according to Lucio. As a result, the traditional dynamic is IT being a type of supplier for business.

“In many ways, we have missed on this shift from IT becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises,” Lucio added.

Tech team must track the outcomes of software delivery

The BizOps Manifesto outlines four core values for a better alignment between business and IT, which are business outcomes over individual projects and proxy metrics; trust and collaboration over individualism and hierarchy; data-driven decisions over opinions, judgments and persuasion; and learning and pivoting over following a rigid plan. The Manifesto also presents 14 principles to guide companies in this process.

Although these values seem like basic elements for enterprises that are on their digital journeys, they are often not followed. This is demonstrated by a survey conducted about six months ago by Broadcom in partnership with an industry analyst to understand how IT executives were tracking business results.

“There were less than 15% of these executives who were actually tracking the outcomes of the software delivery,” Lucio pointed out. “In my own teams, for instance, we’ve been adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so, and we’ve uncovered that 16% of our resources were basically aligned around initiatives which were not strategic for us.”

This scenario is related to the fact that the metrics used by IT teams — whether it is database uptime, cycle time or others — are usually completely divorced from business metrics.

The solution is to start aligning business metrics with the software delivery chain and, at the same time, infuse some of the agile culture and principles that arise from the software side to the business side, according to Lucio.

“If I’m trying to build a core banking application, my core metric is likely going to be uptime. If I’m trying to build a mobile application or maybe a social mobile app, it’s probably going to be engagement,” he explained. “And so, what you want is for everybody across IT to look at these metrics and what are the metrics within the software delivery chain which ultimately contribute to that business metric.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the BizOps Manifesto Unveiled event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the BizOps Manifesto Unveiled event. Neither Broadcom Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE