Corporations are collections of people with different attitudes, values, interests, and ways of expressing themselves. Mission statements, strategies, rules and regulations for conduct, evaluation, and reward are supposed to smooth out the differences and help all the people who make up an organization march together in pursuit of a common goal.

This balancing act works most of the time, and those that are superb at it have a greater chance of overall success if they can get a host of other things right. Those that are seriously or chronically out of balance end up relegated to sub-optimal performance or worse.

Case in point: the alignment between information technology and the business. I've argued for many years in this column that manufacturers and other organizations are not getting a maximum return from their IT investments because of cultural, political, and other factors, including organizational inability to fully absorb and use IT.

A new survey by the Society for Information Management (SIM), an organization of more than 3,600 senior IT executives, underscores the persistence of the alignment problem.

SIM's annual survey, the results of which will be made public next month at SIM's conference in Orlando, reveals that business-IT alignment is once again the number one concern of the association's members. The alignment problem is one that just doesn't seem to get any better, but why?

"There are three primary reasons why alignment has been so elusive," says Jerry Luftman, SIM's vice president of academic community affairs and an associate dean at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. "Too many people talk about aligning IT with the business as opposed to IT and the business. You can't have alignment without equality. Secondly, consultants continually come up with new names — such as converged, synchronized, linked — to describe the problem. We're getting into a semantics war. But the biggest problem is that everyone's looking for a silver bullet."

Luftman says there is no one solution to the IT and business alignment problem. He disagrees with my belief that IT and business cycles, and their patterns of change, move to the beat of different drummers. Instead, he holds that the answer to the alignment problem can be found in a collection of six things that any organization must do to bring IT and the business together.

The first is there must be effective communications between IT and business leaders, with all that that implies in terms of common language, goals, and values. Next, appropriate metrics, including service-level agreements and agreed-upon bottom line objectives, must be in place. Effective governance and a true partnership between IT and the business must exist in addition to the right technology infrastructure. Last, an organization's HR department needs to play a major role in ensuring that the business has the right skills and communications policies.

Lots of things for a business to get right, but the trick Luftman is really asking organizations to perform may lie in how the collection of activities he advocates is managed.

The best approach might be found in figuring out how to balance the activities, as part of a kind of portfolio, based on the particular characteristics of your business. After all these years, the key to solving the IT and business alignment problem may just be a delicate balancing act.