It's no secret that business and technology are frequently misaligned, resulting in failed IT projects and unmet business goals. As companies rely more on technology as driver of business results, the disconnect and finger pointing becomes even more apparent and crippling. How do you close the gap?

According to Faisal Hoque, the answer is management science. He proposes creating a common language and taxonomy for facilitating the business and technology dialog. "Both IT and business collectively are getting it wrong. They get it separately; they just don't get it together," Hoque told me.

Hoque, who is the author of The Alignment Effect: How to Get Real Business Value Out of Technology (Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2002), recently founded a non-profit organization, the BTM (Business Technology Management) Institute) to help bridge the gap and evangelize his management science concepts.

Hoque is also Chairman and CEO of Enamics, which claims to have the industry's only complete and integrated solution for IT strategy, planning and management; portfolio and program management; strategic enterprise architecture; project analysis and design; and IT governance and organization management. Whether Enamics has the "only" software solution bridging the gap is certainly debatable, but Hoque is applying his integrated solution concepts as the starting point for the new organization. He has gathered a impressive group of 15 academic leaders and 15 industry practitioners, including several current and former CIOs, as founding members.

Dale Kutnick, chairman of Meta Group, a former investor in Enamics and co-chair of the group's Industry Council, said the goal isn't to push technology standards as a resolution to what is essentially a management issue, or to promote Enamics. "We have the opportunity to begin defining specific steps, models, methods, best practices for business and a lingua franca between business and technology people that can be shared with everybody in the industry and benefit the whole of IT."

According to Hoque, the BTM Institute will apply management science to standardizing language and articulating best practices around management principles, processes, and policies; taxonomies of skills, roles, and performance/quality measures; and common lexicon of industry terms and definitions.

The common language would have an effect similar to how basic accounting terms and principles--such as P&L or net profit--are generally understood (and sometimes abused) and accepted.

Hoque referenced portfolio program management as an example of an area in need of standard definitions and an understanding of how it connects to other business processes. "Today, program portfolio management is loosely defined and there are no standards; definitions vary form vendor to vendor and customer to customer," Hoque said. "It incorporates how IT and business look at IT investing in general, and how processes and organization models are set up, as well as policies that establish rules of engagement between business and technology. For successful engagement, a common language and taxonomy is required."

Co-Chair of the BTM Institute's Academic Council Bob Zmud, Michael F. Price Chair of MIS at the University of Oklahoma, has hopes the research effort will help leverage the value of technology in enterprises. "It's hard to carry on a dialog without a common language and understanding of what needs to be done," Zmud said. "We want to create structure to better enable collaboration on how to change organizations through the use of technology, improving effectiveness and having a greater capability to sustain the benefits. We also will study the different processes put in play and try to understand better why they produce benefit."

Clearly, the BTM Institute has a hefty agenda. The charter states that the BTM Institute will offer "accessible research, publications, books, multi-disciplinary events and workshops, and promote professional standards, specialized knowledge and processes," not to mention a unified language for business and technology.

Kutnick acknowledged that the Institute has no full-time employees, but said that the non-profit would appropriate intellectual capital from other sources and be a clearinghouse for ideas. "It's very much a collection and synthesis effort," Kutnick said. "We don't have a budget." Enamics is providing initial funding.

The first meeting of the charter members will take place later this month. Hoque said that the Institute has already established a phased timeline with milestones through mid-2004. The milestones include a research agenda, published research intent, establishment of a research knowledgebase, and an executive briefing event. The organization will also open up to new members.

It sounds like an effort that will at least produce solid academic papers and resource information. The challenge will be establishing a standard descriptive language and taxonomy that is vendor neutral and accepted by the industry and, more importantly, the people aligning business and technology within corporations. If the standardization process follows the same pattern as Web services, the BTM Institute is in for a long and contentious battle to gain adoption of its proposals. Nonetheless, it's a battle worth fighting.

You can write to me at dan.farber@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check the archives.