Aligning business and IT goals is a great maxim, but can be tricky to get right in practice. One IT leader who may be close to the mark is Philip Raddon, group IT director at telecoms specialist Kingston Communications.

When it comes to IT and business, his philosophy is simple.

‘You have to have a clear distinction between operational expenditure, where things come straight off the bottom line, and capital expenditure, where it gets depreciated over time – and the problem lies with capital expenditure,’ he says.

‘Too many IT organisations try to secure that entire budget. But capital for new projects in the business will come off that budget, and not the business, so you pay for it.’

Raddon’s solution is to put the responsibility for such new spend back on to the business itself, keeping a relatively small part of the overall technology budget for ongoing operational requirements.

‘This way, it is the company that takes the pain for the extra budget and I do not have to spend all my time defending decisions – it is much more of a co-operative process now. The dynamic has become: “We can work with you if you want to do this, but you have to argue for the money yourself”,’ he says.

Raddon puts such decision making in context: he has led a transformation of the way technology works at the firm. Senior management had been unhappy with the IT organisation, feeling it was failing to deliver and holding the company back from exploiting new opportunities.

‘To get to where it needed to get, there had to be a big change,’ says Raddon. ‘What there was, was not up to it. I saw the challenge as inaugurating major change.’

Raddon, who leads a 200-strong internal IT team, has subsequently concentrated on a ‘credibility building’ phase, with the emphasis on sharpening up the department’s performance.

‘We could hardly talk to our peers in the business groups about what we could do for them when IT was in such a shambles,’ he says.