IT Strategic Planning

IT Strategic Planning (aka Information Technology Strategic Planning) is the vehicle used to ensure that the organization is leveraging technology and technology enabled services, to create value for the organization, stakeholders, customers, and partners. IT Strategic Plans are the “on ramps” to arrive at short and long-term organizational objectives. Typically, getting to an IT Strategic Plan starts with a technology assessment or series of assessments to understand the current state of the organization and to define a roadmap and strategy for achieving the desired future state vision. This helps define a detailed strategy for driving the expected business outcomes associated with change or transformation initiatives.

source: ISCG

Roughly, IT Strategic Planning:

• Identifies committees to lead the work
• Sets a schedule and communicates the purpose and process
• Seeks and uses input from stakeholders with surveys and by meeting with campus groups, like the faculty senate, student leadership, and administrative groups
• Considers broader trends outside the institution
• Prioritizes IT goals and outlines initiatives/projects to reach those goals
• Aligns goals with the institution’s strategic plan
• Identifies resources needed to complete initiatives/projects
• Outlines a structure for implementing and reviewing the plan, creating a continual IT planning process

The maturity of your institution’s strategic planning process informs the scope of your IT strategic plan. For example, if your institution’s strategic plan is specific with statements like, “improve classroom technology for instruction and distance education,” then your IT plan becomes more operational than strategic. On the other hand, if an overall strategic plan is vague or nonexistent, your IT plan becomes more strategic.

The Importance of IT Strategic Planning
IT’s role in the development and execution of business strategy has grown significantly in the era of digital transformation. But as the rate of business and technology change has accelerated, some of the past static, rigid, and disjointed approaches to IT strategic planning fail to keep pace. That’s not to say CIOs should skip IT strategic planning altogether — quite the contrary. Developing and executing a business-aligned IT roadmap is more important than ever. “Given the growing importance of technology in every business, technology organizations must have clear strategic direction and priorities that are closely linked to the business strategy,” says Brad Strock, CIO of PayPal.

Experts and CIOs agree that effective IT strategy begins with an IT-informed business strategy. CIOs must be intimately involved in the creation of those documents and other artifacts that provide direction about what the enterprise needs to do, why it needs to do it, and how it will accomplish that. Only then can IT leaders build their own functional plans to support business strategy. “The plan is about understanding where to make investments and what capabilities the company will need — the people, partners, processes, and systems required — to do that,” says Fenwick. When done well, IT strategic planning can be a powerful tool, setting the company up to realize key business goals and outcomes. But CIOs must be willing to embrace new approaches to planning that are more business-driven, flexible, and frequently revisited. Unfortunately, says Fenwick, strategic planning practices tend to evolve slowly. But IT leaders today don’t have time to waste.

IT Strategic Planning Process
Stakeholders must follow an organized process for IT strategic planning to yield an actionable plan. There are four phases to the process, building on one another to inform decisions.

• Discovery Phase: During the discovery phase, the CIO and IT leaders will work with business units to identify issues and opportunities, as well as obtain cross-enterprise buy-in. Because the IT strategic plan supports business pursuits, it is important to understand the business strategic goals, objectives, and relative priorities.
• Analysis & Funding Phase: The analysis and funding phase in IT strategic planning give leaders the opportunity to analyze stakeholder feedback; perform a SWOT analysis; and understand options and make tradeoff decisions with scenario planning. HBR says, “Strategy, at its most basic level, is a set of choices and trade-offs about where an organization will invest, compete, and win. Most executives struggle to understand the implications of not making effective trade-offs.” Once leaders align IT goals and objectives with those of the business, they must assess the required resources in terms of people, technology, and funding. If any one of these resources is insufficient, the strategy must be revised, or other priorities adjusted. Continuous planning and funding aligned to strategy create necessary financial controls focused on results and answers “what are our desired results and how much should we plan on investing to obtain them?”
• Execution Phase: The purpose of the execution phase in IT strategic planning is to define the deliverables and outcomes as they relate to the business objectives, as well as discuss dependencies, risk mitigation and sequencing. Now is the time to outline and further prioritize long-term and medium-term IT goals and objectives, and then build a plan with a roadmap that connects strategy to the investments and outcomes that will drive transformation. Include a budget, timeline with milestones, roles and responsibilities, and KPIs with measurement timelines. All must be then communicated to and aligned with the groups involved.
• Measurement and Review Phase: Finally, the measurement and review phase offers the opportunity to benchmark success and create a feedback loop that informs decisions about whether the plan needs revision. The plan can be adapted based on what’s been learned, change, shifts in strategies, or other influences that impact whether the current strategy deserves continued funding. IT strategic planning is continual and iterative, ensuring it is always relevant and the guiding force behind all work.

The New Role of the IT Strategic Planning Process
Waze is an outstanding example to explain how the IT strategic planning process has taken a much more central place in business. This collaborative application allows vehicle drivers to find the best routes (using the location and speed of users to determine less congested routes). It is the technology involved in this system that adds value to the product. It’s different from using the IT strategic planning process to make a production line more efficient, pay employees, serve customers better, make calculations, gather information for decision making, or run a business.

The IT strategic planning process itself generates value to the end customer and, consequently, to the company. In addition to decreeing the end of the automotive GPS industry, WAZE is much more efficient. It not only indicates the correct and closest route but updates real-time information on traffic conditions by changing the route with instant messaging. Therefore, it’s not necessary to work in technology for the IT strategic planning process to be central to a business, helping to create and conquer new markets.

Schools, hospitals, hotels, the manufacturing industry in general, and virtually all large-scale businesses, no longer see IT processes as ancillary to strategic processes in value generation. But regardless of this renewed importance of the IT strategic planning process, its planning methodology is a consolidated procedure. We will summarize this next.