EA Voices

I have observed many situations where a c-level person was supposed to document an IT Strategy in a short period of time in order to prepare the following year’s annual budget. Very often lacking much supporting documented business information the result is a weak strategy, sometimes ignored by the user’s community, the key stakeholders.

A weak IT strategy can be costly and wasteful, especially for resource-constrained organizations that operate with minimal budget, tools, knowledge and people.  It also implies that organizations cannot respond to changing business requirements rapidly enough. The absence of strategic anticipation causes organizations to be inefficiently reactive, forcing them to work in a constant state of catch-up.

An IT Strategy should answer the following questions:

• Are we doing the right things with technology to address the organization’s most important business priorities and continuously deliver value to the clients?
• Are we making the right technology investments?
• Do we measure what is the real value to the organization derived from that technology?
• Is our current Information Technology agile enough; flexible to continuously support a successful organization?
• Is our Information Technology environment properly managed, maintained, secured, able to support the clients, and is it cost effective?
• Can our strategy support current and future business needs?

Quite often the first thing we should consider when writing such a document is the targeted audience and its content. Different people with varying roles and responsibilities may read an IT Strategy within a company, so the document may need to serve several different purposes. It is not easy to pitch a strategy to different levels in the hierarchy within an organization, and at the appropriate level of detail. Sometimes it is too detailed and does not always match the stakeholder’s needs.

An IT Strategy is an iterative process to align IT capabilities with the business strategy and requirements:

• It is a documented and approved process (part of the organization’s governance framework)
• It is iterative (it needs to be frequently be revisited). Traditionally, IT strategies are updated and communicated on an annual basis, usually to meet budget cycles. This should be considered the minimum review period. If an emerging technology surfaces that has the potential to enhance the business, it should be investigated and communicated to the business as soon as possible. A one-year cycle may be too late.
• It is a strong alignment of business and IT capabilities rather than designing IT solutions to support business requirements
  • Assuming that both business and IT capabilities drive each other
  • Assuming that business drives IT and not the other way around
• The IT Strategy sets future direction for IT function in the organization
  • Ensuring that the IT budget is spent on value creation activities for the business
  • Creating shareholder value
  • Helping to maximize the return on IT investments
• The IT Strategy may include sub-elements such as:
  • Infrastructure strategy
  • Application strategy
  • Integration strategy
  • Service strategy
  • Sourcing strategy
  • Innovation strategy

This pyramid diagram can be used to illustrate the IT strategy and vision, and how the technology and business strategies are totally aligned. At the top of the pyramid is the enterprise overarching vision. Aligned below that is how IT supports the vision by becoming a premier IT organization in creating competitive advantage for the clients. The IT vision is in turn supported by three pillars: integration, improvement, and innovation.

To deliver this , the business strategy should clearly be articulated and documented taking into account some IT aspects. There are different ways of gathering these business inputs.
The first approach is a very classical one where you develop a questionnaire in business terms which asks each business unit to identify their future requirements for infrastructure growth, taking into account capacity and availability requirements. This extracts the data you need for business driven strategy.

This questionnaire may include some of the following examples of questions:

1. What are your top 5 business “pain” points? These are things that you wish you had a solution for
2. What are your top 5 business objectives? These can be short term or long term, can be driven by revenue, cost, time, time to market, competitive advantage, risk or various other reasons
3. How do you plan to achieve these objectives?
4. What will we gain by leveraging IT Capabilities across the business?
5. What is in the way of achieving your business imperatives?
6. Can IT help achieve your business imperatives?
7. How much do you spend on IT capabilities?
8. What is your technology ROI?
9. Does your company have a plan for technology?
10. Does your business plan include a technology plan?
11. Where is IT being used across your business unit?

The second approach would be the use of Enterprise Archite