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This really would be the holy grail for business and IT managers -- but we are not there yet. For business value the common metric is hard dollars and I believe this is right. True these are hard to calculate for many IT services in isolation but anything less is frankly not engaging the fundamental business agenda and will need to be answered sooner or later.
Measuring business alignment is a more relative challenge requiring a clear definition of business direction and IT direction. The biggest problem is often getting these clearly defined in sufficient detail -- one of the major difficulties for successful IT alignment. The best framework I have come across for benchmarking is that offered by a firm called CogniTech -- they have a structured approach to capturing business and IT objectives and a sophisticated model which then calculates the IS contribution at a business unit level.
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