Developing an IT Strategy

Sets out the goals of this chapter, to:

1. Formalising the Case for a business strategy

2. Understand the Business

3. Quickly assess IT State Analysis

4. Identify the Sponsor and Audience Concerns

Why should we put a business case together for undertaking the IT Strategy development?

What could the structure of the business case look like?

We are going to need to position our strategy in a context of the business; role and direction.

Considers the state of the current IT Function to identify key early opportunities for the strategy.

Who is sponsoring the strategy and what do they need from the strategy?

Chapter summary.

Sets out the goals for this chapter:

1. Definition of Strategy as Applied to IT

2. General and Specific Strategies in IT

3. Components of General IT Strategy

What do we mean by strategy as a term as applied to the business and IT organisations.

The major part of the course is to deliver a general IT strategy. This section introduces the components that make up that strategy.

The IT Strategy is not the only strategic asset we will find in our organisation. Some other assets exist which can guide us on  formats work well within our organisation and to reference to give our strategy relevance.

As we go on our journey through the different subjects within the general IT strategy, we will build up our strategic plan. This is defined in terms of objectives.

Summary of this section.

Sets out the goals for the chapter.

1. What is Business Strategy

2. Where to Find Business Strategy

3. Key Areas to Drive IT Strategy

4. Capturing Business Strategy within IT Strategy

Define the business strategy in terms of:

• Financial or Stakeholder Perspective

• Customer Perspective

• Operational Perspective

• People Perspective

Researching the business strategy from:

• Shareholder reports

• CEO Briefings

• Executive Communications

• Marketing Campaigns

Which parts of the business strategy will drive the evolution of the IT strategy.

Capturing the business strategy for IT.

Organisation's structure are often not helpful for driving the IT Strategy. They aggregate functions in way that hide areas of importance for IT alignment. They also include duplication of functions which may cause repetition in explain alignment. It is therefore useful to translate the business in to a business capability model.

Summary for this chapter.

Our goals are to develop a strategic level version of the service catalogue. One we can then use to map to the capability model we build within the business strategy chapter and the organisation model. We will then look at the business strategy drivers and how they may affect the services.

In this lecture we are going to briefly level-set on what a service catalogue is and its importance to IT.

For the strategy we are going adapt the existing service catalogue a little to make it more usable for our strategy.

Using the strategic service catalogue to map to the organisation and identify anomalies.

Using the strategic service catalogue to map to the capability model and identify anomalies.

We may have drivers coming through in terms of business growth pans, new geographies, mergers and acquisitions or divesting of divisions. These may drive future changes to our services.

In this section we have begun to bring the Business and IT Strategy together. Finding opportunities for alignment and capturing these as objectives.

1. Define what we mean by disruptors and the opportunities

2. Look at the horizon scanning process and provide a framework

3. Consider how disruptors are best represented as objectives in our strategic plan

Horizon scanning has become a common phrase in IT without much definition of what we really mean by the term. For our IT Strategy this is around market disruptors.

Having explained that there is no consistent process for horizon scanning, I need to introduce an approach here. This is my suggestion base on my experience and how I have seen others succeed at this.

Now we have identified some disruptors we need to consider how to shape these as objectives.

Summary of this section.

Section goals are:

1. Landscape Assessment

2. Engineering Strategy

3. Business Strategy Drivers

Assets are application and infrastructure underpinning the services that IT offer. Engineering is then the maintenance and delivery of enhancements to these assets.

A simple framework for assessing the IT Asset Landscape.

Engineering strategy is about our process, team structure and alignment to the business divisions.

How might this drive forward the asset and engineering approach.

Section summary

Goals of this section are:

1. Identify existing people strategies

2. Reference existing strategies and action plans

3. Present a checklist of common IT people opportunities

The organisation's HR Strategy and aligning it to IT.

Checklist of people challenges and opportunities common in IT organisations.

Section summary

Goals for this section:

1. Integrating Suppliers Engagement

2. Drivers for Operating Model Change

3. Budget Challenges

IT Organisation are absolutely dependent on suppliers. Though a supplier strategy and governance model will normally be organisation wider, the IT function has to consider how it is using those model to get the best value and most effective services for the organisation.

The operating model is how IT works. This isn’t a course about operating models but we do need to consider any requirement to strategically evolve it.

IT Strategy is unlikely to identify new challenges or real opportunities for the IT budget. It cannot though operate outside of the remit of the budget.

Summary of this section.

Section goals:

1. Understand the data strategy scope decision

2. Five key dimensions for data strategy

3. Value of data maturity assessment

We need to ask the question is the data strategy in scope for our IT Strategy?

The IT team manage the systems that produce the data and are normally the custodians of managing the platform on which data is analysed. The data remains the property of the business teams. Where is the data ambition being driven and who is sponsoring it?

A data strategy needs to consider:

• Skills

• Analytics

• Governance

• Engineering

• Operations

If we want to do a more detail analysis of our data landscape or benchmark the organisation against peers we should do a more formal data maturity assessments.

Summary of this section