The Alignment Problem with Joe Forgét

Most growing businesses do not wake up one morning and decide to make IT complicated. It happens quietly.

One department signs up for a new platform. Another team builds a workaround. HR buys software without involving IT. Sales starts using an AI tool because it “saves time.” Finance finds out later that the tool does not integrate cleanly with anything else.

Nobody meant to create risk. Everybody was trying to move faster.

That is exactly why leadership alignment matters.

In a recent episode of Shh... IT Happens, we spoke with John Ohlwiler, CEO at Sentry Technology Solutions, and Joe Forgét, Founder of Igniting Momentum and Strategy & Growth Advisor. Joe helps leadership teams align, scale, and create enterprise value. He brings a business-owner perspective to the IT conversation, especially around how leadership alignment impacts technology decisions, operational efficiency, growth, and long-term business value.

The conversation landed on a point every business owner should take seriously: IT problems often start as alignment problems.

Technology decisions are business decisions

There was a time when IT mostly meant computers, printers, servers, and the firewall in the closet.

That world is gone.

Today, IT touches sales, finance, HR, operations, customer experience, compliance, cybersecurity, vendor management, and valuation. Your CRM affects sales performance. Your HR platform affects onboarding. Your Microsoft 365 environment affects security. Your backup strategy affects whether the business can survive ransomware.

Technology is no longer a support function sitting in the back room with the cables and emergency snacks. It is part of how the business runs.

That means your IT strategy needs to understand where the company is going.

Are you opening new locations? Hiring aggressively? Preparing for a sale? Trying to reduce owner dependency? Moving more operations to the cloud? Pursuing compliance requirements? Expanding remote work?

Those answers change what your IT team should recommend.

Without that context, IT is forced to react. That is when costs rise, frustration builds, and tools get bolted together like a garage project with a business license.

Misalignment usually shows up in the tools

Joe Forget explained that many leadership teams think they are aligned because they are having meetings, making decisions, and moving fast. The warning signs show up when the same issues keep returning.

Decisions get made in silos. The owner stays stuck as the glue holding everything together. Departments solve problems independently. Technology decisions become reactive instead of proactive.

From the IT side, this is easy to spot.

John Ohlwiler shared an example of a company that brought in Workday through HR without involving IT early enough. Later, the company needed integrations, user management, Microsoft 365 connections, workflow support, and ticketing style functions. Some of those needs could have been planned from the beginning.

Instead, the business bought a powerful platform and used only a fraction of its value.

That is the technology version of buying a Cadillac and using it to store jumper cables.

The issue was not the software. The issue was the process around the software.

Your IT team sees more than you think

One of the best points from the episode was simple: IT often sees the disconnect before leadership does.

Your IT team talks to everyone. They hear from the remote office, the new hire, the frustrated manager, the executive assistant, the sales rep who cannot access the CRM, and the finance team trying to clean up a process that should have been automated two years ago.

That gives IT a rare view across the whole company.

They can see when one department believes the business is going one direction while another department is building systems for a completely different reality.

That visibility is valuable, but only if IT has a seat at the planning table.

If leadership waits to bring IT in after the decision is made, the conversation becomes, “Why is this taking so long?” or “Why is this more expensive than expected?”

The better question is, “What does this decision require from a systems, security, data, and support perspective?”

Ask that before the contract is signed.

AI makes alignment even more important

AI came up during the conversation, and for good reason.

Many businesses are under pressure to adopt AI quickly. The promise is appealing: save time, automate tasks, improve output, and move faster.

The danger is that AI does not fix broken processes. It accelerates them.

If your team handles the same task five different ways, AI will not magically create consistency. If your data is messy, AI will produce messy results faster. If employees do not understand the business context, the AI tools they use will lack that context too.

Garbage in, garbage out now comes with a turbocharger.

Before rolling out AI, leadership needs to answer practical questions:

• What problem are we solving?

• Who owns the process?

• What data can the tool access?

• What should never be entered into the tool?

• How will we measure success?

• Who reviews the output?

• What happens when the AI is wrong?

Those are not just IT questions. They are leadership questions with technical consequences.

Growth and scalable growth are different things

A business can grow while becoming more fragile.

Revenue may be increasing, but the owner may still be approving every decision. Staff may be expanding, but onboarding may depend on one person’s memory. New tools may be added, but no one may know who owns each platform.

That kind of growth looks good on paper until something breaks.

Joe made an important distinction in the episode: growing and growing in a scalable fashion are not the same thing.

Scalable businesses have clear priorities, documented processes, trusted teams, and technology that supports the direction of the company. That matters for daily operations. It also matters for long-term value.

If a buyer, investor, insurer, or auditor looks at your business, they are going to care about more than your revenue. They will want to know whether the business can operate without the owner constantly stepping in. They will want to know whether your systems are secure, documented, supported, and resilient.

IT can either support that value or quietly drain it.

The practical fix: bring IT into strategy earlier

You do not need to turn every leadership meeting into a technical workshop. Please do not. Nobody needs a surprise subnet lecture before lunch.

You do need a better operating rhythm between leadership and IT.

Start with these habits:

Review upcoming business changes with IT before decisions are finalized.

Include IT in software selection before contracts are signed.

Map major tools to business processes and owners.

Create a technology roadmap tied to growth goals.

Review cybersecurity, backups, licensing, and vendor risk quarterly.

Document who owns each system, integration, and workflow.

Train employees before launching new platforms or AI tools.

The goal is clarity. When people understand why a change is happening, what the business is trying to accomplish, and how the technology supports the plan, adoption improves.

People do not resist change because they hate progress. They resist change when it feels random, poorly explained, or dumped on them without context.

Where Solve iT fits in

At Solve iT, we help businesses connect technology decisions to business outcomes.

That may mean fully managed IT support for a company without internal IT. It may mean co-managed IT for an internal team that needs help with patching, monitoring, security, backups, documentation, or projects. It may mean strategic planning with leadership so technology spend supports growth instead of reacting to chaos.

The best IT programs are built around people, process, and technology.

Tools matter. Firewalls matter. Backups matter. Endpoint protection matters. So do communication, ownership, planning, and trust.

If your business is growing, adding tools, experimenting with AI, preparing for compliance, or simply feeling more complicated than it used to, it may be time to step back and look at the full picture.

If you are not sure whether your current vendors, systems, backups, cybersecurity controls, and incident response plans are where they should be, Solve iT can help.

Our free threat assessment gives you a practical look at your risk profile, including cybersecurity gaps, dark web exposure, phishing risk, and cyber insurance readiness.

Book your free threat assessment, and let’s find the quiet risks before they become loud problems.