IT Strategic Planning

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IT Strategic Planning

IT Strategic Planning

If you’re an IT manager, chances are good you’ll be involved in IT strategic planning during your career. Sometimes strategic planning goes well. Sometimes it doesn’t. And strategic plans are often filed away in cloud storage, seldom referenced and hardly ever used.

Which begs the question: if no one uses your IT strategic plan, why bother creating one?

IT strategic planning has several significant benefits—even when the plan is seldom looked at. Today, we’ll discuss why it’s important to have an IT strategy and what IT strategic planning does for an organization. Specifically, we’ll look at:

What is an IT strategy?

Stephen Covey popularized the phrase “begin with the end in mind.” This phrase captures the spirit of a strategic planning process. If we do not know where we want to be in 3-5 years, how do we ever stand a chance of getting there?

An IT strategy defines your IT vision and creates a strategic roadmap for using information technology, digital assets, and technical knowledge to create organizational value (i.e., its strategy). As we’ve written before, your IT strategy answers one particularly important question for your organization:

What IT changes are demanded to align IT with our organizational goals, support our business strategy, and create value for the organization?

Looked at this way, IT strategic planning is the process that gets us out of our day-to-day thinking. It focuses on the important—not the urgent. An IT strategy creates a mechanism for achieving our most important goals.

Successful IT strategies

It’s just as important to understand what an IT strategy isn’t as well as what it is.
Successful IT strategies are:

Strategic, not tactical

A strategic plan is a framework that guides an organization in making decisions and implementing solutions that create meaningful value, support the business strategy, and meet organizational goals. It focuses on the IT vision, processes, organization, and infrastructure, the whats and whens of aligning IT with its business goals and increasing IT capability.
Tactical plans focus on specific information for what must be done (the hows of executing the strategy). Tactics support your strategy and can rapidly change over time. Strategic plans often fail because they focus on tactics, not the strategy itself.

Dynamic, not static

An IT strategy is a process not a one-time event. Your strategy shouldn’t be saved on write-once storage; It must be revised on a regular basis.
Our own personal preference is to write a 5-year strategic plan every year.

A strategic plan should allow for updates, and it must adapt to changes in the market. A strategic plan considers what the future may hold and aligns IT and business resources today to support that vision. By regularly reconsidering what the future should look like, you can make small manageable course corrections rather than having to “right the ship” when unexpected change occurs.
Tactical plans focus on specific information for what must be done (the hows of executing the strategy). Tactics support your strategy and can rapidly change over time. Strategic plans often fail because they focus on tactics, not the strategy itself.

Published with limits, non-restrictive

In our next section, we’ll go over several benefits an IT strategy provides. Implicit in these benefits is the assumption that the published IT strategy is available to all affected staff. Upper-level management shouldn’t be the only ones who understand the IT strategy.
Except for confidential information, anyone expected to implement the strategy should understand the strategy. Your IT strategy should be shared, not restricted.