Most tech executives and companies continue to operate as cost centers: utilities and suppliers driven by cost savings. However, as your company’s business and technology strategy grows more fast-paced, customer-centric, and insight-driven, this is changing. Value effectiveness is becoming increasingly important, and an IT Strategy Plan is essential.
An organization’s IT Strategic plan should reflect the unique needs of the organization as well as the market in which it operates.
The strategy doesn’t exist in isolation and there is no industry standard for developing an IT Strategy.
Things to consider in an IT strategy plan
– Technology Impact – Does the strategy recognize and acknowledge that changes in technology can have a significant impact on your Organisation?
– Commitment to Investing in People – Does the strategy recognize a need to invest in professional development to leverage modern technologies?
– Update Mechanism – Does the strategy provide a mechanism for updating the current IT infrastructure?
– Easy to Understand – Can the goals of the strategy be easily understood, and applied to daily operations?
– Tangible Outcomes – Does the strategy provide a clear picture of what successful IT Strategy implementation looks like with a defined outcome?
Steps to perform
1. Analyse the environment (both outside and inside)
Before you create or update your Company’s IT strategy you need to collect information. This includes performing tasks such as analyzing your strengths and weaknesses, understanding trends within your industry, understanding trends outside of your industry, and understanding what your competitors are doing.
– This step is the baseline of the strategic approach as will define your call for transformation
– Identify the trends in your industry and technology that could have the most impact on your Strategic Plan
– Define your priorities over the next years which helps to rationalize and focus your work and gives you some confidence that you are moving toward the highest and best purpose of technology
– Identify Organizational Enablers and Barriers
– Strategic analysis over the competition
The output of this process shall be an enhanced organizational IT Vision
Example:
Easy access to information, data, and knowledge
IT Assisted Business Decision
Fast Market Reaction and Adaptability
Strict Financial Control
2. Create guiding principles to help your teams better understand how the vision can be achieved
The guiding principles describe the essence of what you want to accomplish with the Strategic Plan.
Example:
Drive toward efficiencies and cost savings.
Identify opportunities for simplification to enable agility and enhance ease of use.
Focus on open architectures and open data to enable flexibility, integration, and interoperability.
Forge strategic partnerships and leverage resources beyond your organization to accelerate your ability to deliver solutions
3. Assessment of the current IT infrastructure
– Gap Analysis
– Option analysis
– IT Impact assessment
4. Strategy development
– Recommend strategies
5. Project Portfolio phase
– Create a balanced portfolio of initiatives
– IT Roadmap
– Financial Impact
6. Planning Phase
– Elaborate a solid plan of action based on the previous
This shift to a future-fit technology strategy needs a change in the operating model of the tech company. There are several things to consider when implementing the IT Strategy Plan.
From strategy to production, provide end-to-end value visibility to all stakeholders.
Traditional businesses are organized around the activity-centric demands of separate, functional organizations, with the cost efficiency of those businesses in mind. Future-fit companies break down silos by concentrating on how end-to-end activities, or value streams, interact to offer value to customers as a whole.
Create value in the ecosystems of the company, its partners, and its customers.
Value flows are growing increasingly complicated as linear value chains give way to ecosystem-based value creation. End-to-end planning, mapping, and control of value delivery across these dynamic and networked ecosystems are made possible by value streams. This enables problem resolution and performance optimization by providing transparency of expenses and resource availability.
Get the most out of activity flows by combining services from a variety of business capabilities.
By moving the conversation from the activity (what needs to be done) to the outcome (what should be done), value streams increase effectiveness (why it needs to be done). Each value stream facilitates the alignment of internal and external business capabilities, as well as the services they supply and consume, on clear and transparent business and customer results.
