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Today’s business IT landscape provides unparalleled opportunity for achievement, but it can also look like an increasingly complex landscape to navigate. As your business seeks to modernise, scale, and continue succeeding, an ad hoc approach to technology investment is a dangerous approach that can strongly impede performance.
A well-crafted IT strategy is the ideal defence, providing clarity, direction, and oversight to organisations as they navigate an ever-evolving IT landscape.
An IT strategy is very important because it helps a company plan and use technology in a smart way. Just like a roadmap helps you find your way on a trip, an IT strategy guides a company in using technology to reach its goals.
When a company's IT strategy matches its overall business strategy, it's like having all the parts of a machine working together smoothly. This makes the company's business processes work better and can give it an advantage over others. IT strategy also helps with managing technology and software, reducing risks, and making sure the company gets the most from its hardware and software. So, having an effective IT strategy is key to business success.
An IT strategy is a well-defined plan that outlines how an organisation will leverage technology to achieve its strategic goals and objectives. This encompasses goals not only within IT departments but also broader business objectives.
Typically developed as part of a larger business strategy, although they can be separate documents, an IT strategy is documented in an IT strategic plan. This comprehensive document not only details the organisation's current technology investments but also lays out future technology investments. It provides insights into how various IT elements align with and support the broader needs of the organisation.
A successful implementation of an IT strategy involves integrating emerging technologies, prioritising technology initiatives, and aligning them with the business's core values. It enables efficient management of information technology, including hardware and software, and leverages human capital management.
Moreover, a well-defined IT strategy ensures institutional knowledge is harnessed to drive innovation and supports revenue-generating initiatives beyond just the IT department, touching all facets of technology management.
Developing a comprehensive plan for your organisation’s IT strategy delivers numerous benefits. This is true whether you develop your IT strategy independently or work with IT consulting or IT professional services.
Digital transformation is mission-critical for businesses looking to reimagine existing processes and leverage new, digitally native capabilities. But the process is far from simple and entering into it with no strategy in place is misguided at best.
In the modern business landscape, improved IT capabilities are one extremely important catalyst for business growth. These capabilities come about via new applications and more powerful computing capability. Utilising these strategically, not haphazardly, is the key to unlocking growth.
IT is an expensive component for every business, and the available solutions evolve almost daily. Take any potential new IT investment: it’s a given that your organisation will spend on IT, but far less certain that you’ll gain the needed value and sustain that value over time.
An IT strategy helps rein in chaotic spending that may or may not generate value, guiding organistaions toward better principles for selecting IT upgrades that create ongoing, sustainable value and avoiding those that will not.
As businesses become increasingly reliant on technology (including Cloud technologies like IaaS), their risks and exposures change. Where a system going down may have been a problem in need of fixing in decades past, today it could approach crisis level.
Part of any comprehensive IT strategy is identifying IT-related organisational risks. By identifying these risks and, where necessary, taking action to mitigate them, organisations improve their IT security in ways not possible without a cohesive IT strategy.
Yes. Or, perhaps better stated, every company already has an IT strategy. The question is whether that strategy is intentional and well-designed or whether it’s simply a haphazard amalgamation of the policies and governance surrounding each piece of IT infrastructure.
Still, every company that wants to thrive needs the former, an intentional and well-designed IT strategy.
Why? Because digital transformation — also no longer optional — requires such a strategy. With a strategy in place, organisations can understand their IT estate and map out its trajectory as they seek to improve productivity, focus the customer experience, and even create new ways of generating value.
The elements of a well-designed IT strategy will vary depending on your organisational structure, business models, and digital maturity, among dozens of other factors. It’s also common to work with outside IT consulting or IT professional services partners, who can provide an objective, unbiased assessment that sidesteps internal politics.
While your exact workflow will be unique to your business, it will likely contain at least these elements.
First up is setting the biggest-picture framework using vision and mission statements. These often begin with the organisation’s broader vision and mission statements but refine them to fit the context of IT strategy.
Next is understanding where your organisation needs to go to achieve that mission and vision and building out a roadmap to get there.
Part of designing that roadmap is categorizing where your organisation stands at present, so assessing the current state of your IT positions is an integral element.
IT no longer exists in isolation or only to serve other departments and divisions within a company. Today, IT is deeply intertwined throughout the organisation, so a well-designed IT strategy takes into account the needs and opportunities across the business. Any strategic changes in IT must support or otherwise account for the various functions and needs that IT currently meets.
With both the future roadmap and the current inventory complete, perform a gap analysis to identify what’s missing between now and where your IT strategy projects you to go.
Your business does not have as its chief goal to exist in a sea of sameness; you want your business to exceed and excel. An IT-oriented competitive analysis identifies what areas you lead the competition as well as potential advantages IT can deliver on either the tactical or strategic level.
An IT strategy should get specific about what it seeks to accomplish, both in the near term (day to day) and down the road (strategic vision). These strategic goals should include both what your internal teams will execute as well as what they won’t execute.
Will your business maintain all IT operations internally, or will a third-party vendor operate elements for you? For example, your IT strategy should denote whether you’ll work with a partner for IT managed services or IT infrastructure management.
Another aspect of operating model that your IT strategy should cover is infrastructure; specifically, the question of Cloud. With the increasing reliance on PaaS and IaaS, hybrid Cloud in IT strategy plays an increasingly valuable role. Current and future Cloud strategies should be noted in the strategy document.
Last, your IT strategy should include information on how the organisation or its partners will monitor adherence to and progress through the strategy. An unmonitored and unassessed strategy is a strategy primed for failure, so note within the strategy itself who will do the monitoring and what systems or tools they will use to do it.
In most businesses the IT strategy should flow out of the larger business strategy. Sometimes these two documents are developed and maintained as one, while often they follow separate development processes.
In a traditional IT strategy approach, an organisation convenes a team (which may include external consultants) for formulating a long-term (three to five year) IT strategy. The process is lengthy and detailed, with up to six months devoted to discovery alone. The roadmap developed is detailed but relatively inflexible, and the IT strategy team disbands once this roadmap is approved.
Agile takes a much more flexible approach, designing the same kind of three-year plan but perhaps with less detail toward the end of the roadmap. Agile IT strategy teams don’t disband after creating the roadmap, though: they meet at set intervals (often quarterly) to evaluate, adjust, and realign. This is the crucial difference between the two approaches.
Canon Business Services ANZ provides top-quality services to many of the largest and most successful companies throughout Australia and New Zealand. We offer the Cloud services you need to act on your IT strategy, including private Cloud, Azure Public Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud. And more importantly, we can provide the big-picture vision necessary to develop a cohesive IT strategy via our IT consulting services.
Our IT consulting services assist organisations with IT strategy formation and much more, and numerous other service arms (including IT professional services, Managed IT Services, and Business Process Automation combine to ensure successful execution of that strategy.
An IT strategy plays a crucial role in guiding technology investments and decisions within an organisation. It serves as a roadmap that aligns technology initiatives with the overall business strategy. By defining clear objectives and priorities, it makes sure that investments in hardware, software, and technology solutions directly contribute to achieving business goals. Additionally, it aids in risk management by identifying potential technology challenges and opportunities, enabling informed decision-making to maintain a competitive advantage.
To ensure alignment between an organisation's IT strategy and broader business objectives and goals, effective strategic planning is essential. Business leaders should actively engage with IT leaders to identify technology's role in achieving business success. This involves understanding business processes, priorities, and knowledge management needs. Regular communication and collaboration between IT and business departments help maintain this alignment, ensuring that technology initiatives support and enhance the organisation's business strategy.
There are various approaches and methodologies for developing and implementing an IT strategy. One common approach involves analysing the organisation's business strategy and aligning technology initiatives accordingly. Best practices include involving key stakeholders, conducting regular technology assessments, and incorporating flexibility to adapt to evolving business needs. Agile methodologies emphasise iterative planning and continuous improvement. Another approach is technology portfolio management, which prioritises technology investments based on their contribution to business goals.
Key components of an IT strategy typically include defining technology goals, outlining a roadmap for technology management, specifying hardware and software management guidelines, addressing vendor management, and identifying risk management strategies. It also involves setting priorities, ensuring knowledge management, and establishing a clear link between technology initiatives and business objectives. Effective IT strategies consider the organisation's business strategy, aligning technology investments with business priorities.
