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The role of IT has changed. Once seen solely as an enabler of business processes, the IT department is no longer relegated to the sidelines, but has instead become an integral part of business planning and strategy.
As business leaders increasingly recognise the power of technology to help them in achieving their business goals, there’s an opportunity here to level up the use of technology as it currently exists within your organisation.
A strategic IT review can help you deepen your understanding of the role of technology within your organisation, how it supports your business processes and what changes you can make to ensure your business and IT strategy are aligned.
For these reasons, a strategic IT review is often the most logical first step for organisations as they work towards optimising their use of technology, simplifying business processes and fast-tracking their progress.
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.
Most businesses are so caught up in their day-to-day operations that they never really stop to think about how their business is operating, let alone what tools and strategies can be implemented to optimise business outcomes.
A strategic IT review can provide the space and time needed for key stakeholders within your company to see things in a new way. It’s much more than an audit of your IT; it’s an opportunity to redefine the mindset and functioning of your organisation as one that leads with technology.
According to Gartner, companies that adopt this shift in mindset tend to see a number of benefits, including:
Increased opportunities to use technology to support growth: Rather than looking at technology and business strategy as separate entities, organisations that put technology at the forefront understand that it not only facilitates their business strategy but informs it as well.
A clear understanding of goals, priorities and strategies: Setting specific and measurable goals and defining priorities provides you with milestones that help shape your IT roadmap and ensures alignment throughout your organisation.
Staying ahead of the curve on emerging trends in technology: Technology is constantly evolving, with new tools and services launching every day. As an IT leader within your organisation, you’re in a prime position to keep on top of emerging technologies, while also identifying the potential opportunities (and risks) they may present to your organisation.
Ensuring your organisation remains compliant: Whether you’re bound by government-enforced, industry-specific regulations or you’re concerned about the security of your organisation amid mounting data and privacy regulations, a strategic IT review can help ensure that you’re adhering to necessary guidelines.
Ability to effectively communicate the value of IT to key stakeholders: In order to really move the needle in terms of technological advancement within your organisation, you need the buy-in (and the budget) from key leadership.
Undertaking a strategic IT review gives you tangible evidence of the specific ways the right technology can impact your bottom line, enabling you to back up any budgetary requests while also demonstrating the value of technology in terms of business practices and strategy.
Competing goals and priorities can cause friction within your organisation, especially with the increased siloing of different departments that rarely get a chance to interact.
A review is an opportunity to take your IT strategic plan in a new direction while fostering inter-departmental collaboration, making sure that everyone is on the same page and understands each other’s goals.
Within some organisations, the term “IT” can be polarising. However, it’s worth emphasising that these conversations are really about how to harness technology with an IT strategic plan that drives business outcomes, not about individual policies or programs within the company’s tech stack.
That said, a strategic review can also be used to provide insights into the technologies or applications that may already be in use or that are about to be introduced into the business. This gives all stakeholders the opportunity to share their perspectives on how they could be better implemented to help reach the company’s long-term business goals.
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.
A strategic IT review necessitates the involvement of relevant stakeholders which may include the C-suite, management, and in some cases, team leaders of various departments. It’s essential that everyone is involved at all levels of the business, as this provides a clearer picture of your company’s current state, as well as its overarching strategy, goals, objectives, current challenges, and opportunities to add value or reduce friction through technology.
While decision-makers may shy away from the idea of a strategic IT review thinking that it means adding on a slew of expensive new apps and technologies, this isn’t always the case—in fact, a strategic review can help you optimise your use of existing tools and simplify business processes, no new technology required.
A strategic review is also the first step in defining an effective IT strategic plan that corresponds to the unique needs and challenges of your organisation.
For example, imagine you have a company-wide goal of improving your customer experience. One of the best ways to do this is by focusing on your employee experience. Customer-facing employees are a direct reflection of your business, and happy employees are more likely to deliver a customer experience that inspires repeat business.
A strategic IT review can help you address employee experience by streamlining processes, eliminating unnecessary technology, and reducing friction within the programs that remain. Further, as we start to reimagine the employee experience in a post-COVID world, the right IT strategic plan can help you strike a balance between supporting your staff online and on-site.
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.
Ultimately, legacy IT thinking could be holding your organisation back, posing a barrier to advancement and preventing you from making meaningful progress towards your goals.
In order to move forward in a smarter, more strategic way, it’s essential to shift the mindset of key stakeholders within your organisation from looking at IT as an island unto itself to seeing it as an integral and influential part of your business strategy and long-term objectives.
A managed service provider like Canon Business Services ANZ can work with you to develop an IT strategic plan that deepens your understanding of your business, goals, challenges and where technology can make the biggest impact.
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.
