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.

IT Strategic Planning Model
The requirement and the need for companies to have quality Information Technology services make organizations worry about efficiently managing their resources, delivering and giving optimal support to information technology services. In this sense, a descriptive quantitative research was conducted aimed at designing a strategic information technology planning model for higher education institutions that allows the IT4 + model to be aligned and validated by the Ministerio de Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicaciones in Colombia. The IT4+ management model is a model built on experience, best practices and lessons learned during the implementation of the ICT management strategy. IT4+ is an integral model of strategic management with technology whose fundamental base is the alignment between technology management and sectorial or institutional strategy. It is made up of the following components: IT Strategy, IT governance, information analysis, information systems, technology service management, appropriation and use.

Based on the IT4+ model and the level of maturity evaluated in each of the phases of strategic IT planning of a general methodology of the Higher Education Institutions of Norte de Santander, the proposed model consists of six phases emphasizing the analysis of the current situation, in the information technology model and planning, focusing on the understanding of the business strategy and the use and appropriation of information technology that allows all processes to be supported from the strategic levels of business with information technologies. The situational analysis is deepened in two phases: Strategic understanding and acceptance of Information Technology. The IT model phase is deepened by two phases: IT Strategy and Use and appropriation of Information Technologies. Likewise, each phase must have an action plan for its execution, reinforcing the last planning phase. The development of the previous phases allows the Higher Education Institutions of Norte de Santander to deepen in the components where they have a low level of maturity (see Figure below). The validation of the model was carried out using the Dephi methodology.

source: LL Contreras Hernández et al.

• Phase 1: Strategic organizational understanding. In this phase we seek a precise, clear and documented understanding of the current situation of the institution, the organizational context and the environment, in order to provide the directorate of information technologies with guidance that allows it to use technology as a transformation agent, initiating with the evaluation of the organizational maturity, an evaluation for the understanding of the IT culture, evaluation of the operative models and IT and finally an action plan for the execution of said phase.
  • Organizational maturity: A diagnosis must be made of the state of maturity of the organization in relation to the dimensions of the model, qualifying said state of maturity in one of the five levels, functional, enabler, contributory, differentiator and transformer.
  • Model evaluation: understanding of the institution's operating model, the IT model and the efficiency of processes.
  • IT culture: Conduct an evaluation of how information technologies are conceived, which seeks to link people and develop a culture that facilitates the adoption of technology that is essential for IT investments to be productive.
  • Plan of action: Establish a guide for the fulfillment of the objectives of Phase 1 in a determined time.
• Phase 2: Acceptance of IT. Analyze the motivations that influence the acceptance of new technologies aimed at managing information in institutions. Knowing the motivations that push managers to the adoption of new information technologies is a critical aspect to correctly define which factors influence such a transcendent decision for organizations. This phase is composed for the understanding of perceived utility and perceived ease of use.
  • Understanding of perceived utility: Understanding how the use of a technology increases productivity and the development of business activity increasing efficiency as a conclusive factor for business adoption of IT.
  • Perceived ease of use: Establishes the additional effort involved in the application of an innovation, reaching minimum values when the complication of it is greater, so the ease of handling a computer system must positively influence the perception of its usefulness. Action Plan: Establish a guide for the fulfillment of the objectives of phase 2 in a determined time.
• Phase 3: Operating model. This phase includes the analysis of the operational and organizational model of the entity, the information needs and the alignment of IT with the processes, in such a way that we are aware of the changes or adjustments that are made in this regard, preparing the development of the IT strategy.
  • Analysis of the organizational structure: a model of the organization and a business strategy must be established to partially produce the IT requirements necessary to improve the efficiency and productivity of the company, identifying the operational deficiencies in order to redesign or modify them and automate them.
  • Information needs: This is the fundamental input for information management in the organization which is classified into information for decision making, process information and information for stakeholders, taking into consideration the information from the single source, quality information, information as a public good, information in real time and information as a service. Likewise, the available information must be timely, reliable, complete, pertinent and useful.
  • Analysis of processes and technological support: Information systems are created to support the processes of the institution and in that sense, the alignment with the processes of the entity is vital. However, if there is no definition of management processes with quality standards; there is a risk of systematizing bad practices. Through this component, based on the analysis of each process, the information technology required for each area is established.
  • Action Plan: Establish a guide for the fulfillment of the objectives of Phase 3 in a determined time.

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.