Drafting IT strategy

What is IT strategy?

Direction to IT team by translating CEO’s (who values business growth) and the CFO’s (who look after EBITA) expectation into detailed plan and guidelines.

Why IT strategy is required?

As per Gartner mid-size enterprises typically spend 4.9% of revenue in 2023 in IT. It is impartant to demonstrate the wise plan for the spending with measurable ROI.

Who defines IT strategy?

CIO/CTO defines over all IT strategy for the organization’s business strategy with their IT staff (board or leaders). The team will discuss the key elements (ex: resources needed, KPI, Risk) needed for the strategy by keeping their function in mind.

Do we need to strategy for every team or group of teams?

For smaller organization, IT strategy may not required for every team. But all the teams in the organization able to understand what is the strategy by their upper management means to them.

For organization which has hierarchy of departments or complex structure, it is recommendeded to have separate IT strategies for each team. This is mainly when the CIO is not able provide the focus area as either cost saving or innovation. Example the Product development team may need to innovate and spend money for that while the Operations team to improve efficiencies and cut cost.

Key elements of IT strategy

  • Identify the vision and core values
  • Organizational overview / Stakeholders
  • Focus area (Digital Transformation / Cost Saving / Innovation / Security / Increase efficiencies )
  • Key Projects that drives the success of the strategy
  • Financial support and visibility
  • SWAT analysis
  • KPI to measure the ROI.
  • AS-IS analysis report
  • High level implementation plan cross referencing the key projects.
  • Risk

Best Practices for drafting an IT strategy.

  • Vision: What and Why do we want to achieve something in this term?
  • Clarity: It should avoid technical terms/jargons.
  • ROI: It should convince the upper level management to value the investment.
  • Awareness: It must aware of AS-IS situation to define realistic strategy.
  • Risk - What if and what if not?
  • Plan to measure and achieve the ROI.

Resources:

  • https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/it-strategy
  • https://emtemp.gcom.cloud/ngw/globalassets/en/doc/documents/leadership-vision-2023-for-midsize-enterprise-cios.pdf
  • https://avasant.com/report/it-spending-as-a-percentage-of-revenue-by-industry-company-size-and-region/