One of the common challenges most IT departments face is linking a business strategy to a set of IT solutions. The challenge for supporting a strategy is understanding what solutions should be provided to facilitate the strategy. This starts with understanding the four levels of a business strategy. The levels are Business Strategy → Business Capabilities → Business Processes → IT Solutions. All too often we try to directly link IT Solutions to Business Strategy without understanding the intermediate levels. Many IT departments especially skip right by the Business Capability step. As a result, we try to obtain alignment with the business while speaking different languages when it comes to requirements.Once there is a strategy a key next step is to define with the business what they need to be good at to successfully achieve the strategic objective. An organization needs to identify and align around the capabilities required to successfully execute the strategy.  Defined capabilities facilitate the link between strategy and business process. Once we understand what we want to excel at, the ability to identify and design the business processes required to excel becomes much simpler.  It is only after an organization understands it’s strategy, capabilities and business processes that an IT solution can be effectively identified.As an example, a company had a strategy to grow sales by entering adjacent markets. The adjacent markets had a different set of customers, different product and service requirements, and a different distribution model. New capabilities included a different sales approach, shorter technology development cycle times, and the ability to ship to a third-party assembler instead of directly to the customer. Once these capabilities were understood, the variation to the existing sales, product development, and distributions processes could be defined. Without understanding the new capabilities and processes it would have been impossible to choose effective IT solutions. With this understanding it was a straight forward process to identify where existing IT solutions could be extended, and what new IT solutions would best fit the emerging business needs.Truly effective IT teams need to be on guard against jumping to the newest and coolest technologies. Creating value requires that IT leaders and architects spend as much time on understanding business capabilities, as the IT solutions they provide to enable those capabilities.