Alignment, Bittinger said, needs to be linked to architecture and governance for benefits to be realized and to ensure IT projects are on time and under budget.

He said enterprise architecture was unheard of a decade ago but today is an integral part of business use to define strategy.

"More mature organizations have learnt how to integrate business and IT with a clearly defined enterprise architecture roadmap," Bittinger told attendees at the Telelogic user conference in Sydney.

He referred to Gartner research entitled, The Users' View of Why IT Projects Fail, which found up to 46 percent of the systems delivered did not meet requirements while 37 percent met requirements but were delivered late.

"Strategy is key to competitive differentiation and no matter how good your organization is at the process level, strategy will not give you differentiation unless it involves good governance and mechanisms for executing against a roadmap," he said adding that organizations were still fairly immature when it came to delivering projects with real business benefits.