Creating an IT Strategy – Management by Maxim
I have heard that 90% of all businesses do not have a written Business Strategy. Its in their heads – but as an Enterprise Architect how do you extract it so that you can create a viable IT Strategy? Often times CxOs don’t have time to have a strategic dialogue. One way to solve this problem is to employ the “Maxim Process”
The Maxim Process is described by Broadbent and Kitzis as a pragmatic way to extract enough information for a good enough IT strategy while not investing more than a day’s workshop with senior management. The CIO will organize a workshop with CxOs, which will lead to documenting 2 kinds of so-‐called Maxims:
- Business Maxims
- And as a result IT Maxims
Maxims are a few concise principles that are used to document the strategic direction of an enterprise. A Maxim workshop will usually not produce more than around 5 business maxims. For each of those, management will derive 4-‐5 maxims for the IT function that will help to support them.
A typical Maxim Workshop will be split up into two parts:
- Part 1: Finding the Business Maxims,
- Part 2: Deriving the IT Maxims
An external facilitator should moderate the workshop day and process.
To give examples imagine an old economy financial service provider like a big insurance company that runs more than one brand name on the market. For such an enterprise you could find the following business maxim:
- Create synergies in back office and service functions wherever brand identity is not compromised
IT maxims that could be deducted from such a business strategy could be:
- Define standard architectures and platforms used by all of the group’s companies in order to leverage synergies and to reduce IT cost
- Harmonize the IT application systems for the group’s companies wherever there is a business case for this.
SOURCE: TOGAF9 QuickStart Guide 2009
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