Linking business and IT so they work well together. Typically, the lightning rod is the planning process, and true alignment can occur only when the corporate side of the business communicates effectively with line-of-business leaders and IT leaders about costs, reporting and impacts.

Making sure that the IT department does what’s necessary to deliver the benefits promised at the beginning of a project or investment. The best way to get a handle on everything is by developing a process to ensure that certain functions are accelerated when the value proposition is growing and eliminating functions when the value decreases.

One way to manage resources more effectively is to organize your staff more efficiently - for example, by skills instead of by line of business. This allows organizations to deploy employees to various lines of business on a demand basis.

Instituting a formal risk framework that puts some rigor around how IT measures, accepts and manages risk as well as reporting on what IT is managing in terms of risk.

Putting structure around measuring business performance. One popular method involves instituting an IT Balanced Scorecard, which examines where IT makes a contribution in terms of achieving business goals, being a responsible user of resources and developing people. It uses both qualitative and quantitative measures to get those answers.