How to Develop a Good IT Strategy

As soon as you get down to developing an IT strategy, you will see that it’s a hard nut to crack. It is difficult to create a clear vision of a good IT strategy for several reasons:

• Few to zero examples to follow: you may see the results of an effective IT strategy, but it’s almost impossible to get access “behind the curtain” and trace the way a successful company develops its winning IT agenda.
• Rewarding experience of other organizations may not fit your company or you may fail to apply it.
• Businesses vary in their goals, values and philosophy, so it’s impossible to work out a structured pattern that suits everyone.

However, some beacons help to take right steps in the quickly expanding IT universe.

Examine your starting point

The majority of enterprises already use various IT components in one form or another: CRM and ERP systems, corporate websites and intranets, customer portals, mobile apps for employees and clients and more. Before developing an IT strategy, it is important to evaluate the quality and functionality of the IT solutions used in your enterprise in several respects:

• Business satisfaction (how business managers are satisfied with the way IT solutions support corporate operations).
• User satisfaction (how users estimate your IT solutions’ design and functionality).
• Expandability of an application (how it will work for your growing needs in the future).
• Untapped potential of an application (users may be unaware of the options provided by corporate apps).
• Chronically unresolved problems (for example, slow applications, security vulnerabilities).

Pitfalls: too little time allocated to analysis, superficial analysis, unwillingness to face the truth.

Define your destination

When you’ve explored the starting point of IT development, it’s high time to outline the destination. IT strategy is the roadmap between these two points.

IT-Business cooperation

To define the right destination and make technology an enabler that helps to achieve business goals, IT and business leaders should work in close rapport with each other.

Business leaders express their business development expectations, while IT leaders look for IT solutions that can help to meet these expectations. At the same time, business leaders may overlook winning strategical opportunities because they are not fully aware of available IT solutions. So, IT leaders can also show business leaders how to leverage modern technology and help them adjust business goals accordingly. In extreme cases, IT may show new bright opportunities for growth that will allow setting more ambitious business goals.

Don’t forget about the IT core

At the same time, not all IT goals must be bound to business goals directly. Do not forget to continuously develop your IT core, for example, replace too old systems with newer ones and optimize infrastructure (migrate to the cloud, advance the enterprise architecture and align the applications with it). Although it doesn’t influence business directly and its value is not clear for business (in contrast with a new ecommerce website or a new application that allows managing supply chain much better), it can give great benefits in the long run. Otherwise, IT will become unhealthy, and unhealthy IT will not be able to support business. Projects will be chronically delayed and applications will not meet the requirements.

A growing business has its specifics

For a growing business, stating the goals and building the plan to achieve them can be tricky. Long-term objectives might require serious updates due to a number of reasons:

• Customers’ expectations and market situation are changing, so business leaders need to modify their priorities.
• New business-boosting technologies are emerging, and they may be more effective.

In such conditions, an IT strategy requires short-term subgoals that determine the stages to achieve main goals. Clear and concise, they will become the criteria to assess the effectiveness of the overall IT strategy. Focusing on the mid-term horizon a company gets the most of the closest opportunities and remains more flexible to introduce strategic changes when needed.

Design the path

As you can see, the development of an IT strategy requires proper preparation. However, the most important and demanding task is to work out a plan on how to bridge the gap between the current and the desired states of IT in a company.

Decide which solutions you need to support business goals

In this respect, IT department has to explain to business leaders what can be done with technology to improve business. Perhaps, some corporate IT solutions need slight updates, while some should be replaced with better alternatives or even absolutely new systems. You can also learn how to advance business with latest technology solutions if you resort to IT consulting services. Third-party experts can prompt at the IT solutions that suit your specific business needs and give fresh ideas on how to develop an IT strategy for your organization.

Readymade software vs. custom solutions

As for the IT solutions themselves, buying off-the-shelf products would be a good idea to save time and money, but it can be a real challenge to find readymade applications that support business goals with minimal problems (as soon as some problems are likely to arise anyway) and fit a company’s enterprise architecture. Some solutions need additional customization, some are not available on the market at all, and custom software development is the only option.

In this case, you can either develop internally or involve external resources (long-term partners or one-time contractors). Each of these sources of competences has its risks and benefits, and IT strategy should keep these options in balance. The choice has a direct influence on financial planning, time constraint and other elements of an IT strategy.

The problem of priorities

As soon as IT is competing with other corporate investment priorities, IT planning is impossible without considering a company’s financial health. In the context of budget limitations, an organization needs to set up IT priorities and even give away a number of insecure or too expensive opportunities.

Draft a doc

When all the sufferings described (and presumed) above are over, the time is ripe to draw up a document entitled “IT strategy.”

IT strategy, by its very nature, needs to address complex technological details. Still, consider it not a purely technical but rather a business document: brief, clear and comprehensive.

An effective IT plan includes the decisions on staffing, partnerships, organizational changes and governance required to achieve expected outcomes. It can also include an investment portfolio roadmap, timeframes and risks. The degree of the IT strategy complexity correlates with the size of an enterprise and business goals.

A few last words

Developing an effective IT strategy includes assessing your current and future needs, defining a vision and goals for the future and establishing the programs to achieve these goals. It’s a demanding task, but you cannot ignore its importance. Comparing good and bad IT strategies, it’s necessary to highlight that a concise IT strategy aligned with business objectives and values can help your company get the most from the technologies available on the market and the resources you have.

It should also be kept in mind that there is always a gap between IT planning and real success. To achieve success, it’s not enough to know how to develop an IT strategy: you should implement this strategy in a right way, and every step of its implementation requires supervision. But thorough planning is already half the battle, isn’t it?