The IT services landscape is constantly evolving, with new technologies emerging every day. Businesses need a roadmap to help them make the right technology and investment decisions. This is where an IT strategy comes into play.
An IT strategy is a vital component of your company’s IT capability. It lays the foundation for value creation through the use of IT assets and knowledge by establishing what the business needs in particular and how to achieve the objectives in a sustainable way. Not only that, an IT strategy helps companies improve business processes, providing maintenance and support services, proper staffing for IT systems, and other organizational needs.
When you set out to create or modify your IT strategy, you must create a robust and comprehensive IT strategy.
This blog will outline ten steps to ensure an effective and efficient IT strategy.
1. Align your activities with the objectives of the organization
Your IT strategy must be aligned with your organization’s goals to determine how well you are meeting those goals, what value the activities provide to the organization’s stakeholders, and how the strategy could be improved. Being clear about what you want to achieve on an individual level will help structure your IT strategy. You can determine what skills your team needs by mapping business goals to the roles needed to achieve them.
2. Period of coverage
When developing an IT strategy, an important factor is making sure you have a clear timeline for when you want it up and running, which stakeholders will be involved in driving it forward, and how you will measure success. Your IT strategy should be a plan that covers a longer period than your current projects or initiatives.
Try to create an IT strategy for no less than five years, but update it annually to correct course. You don’t have to create a new strategy every year, but update your strategy accordingly if something big happens in the market.
There are some best practices for the coverage period of an IT strategy, such as:
Avoid doing an IT strategy for less than a year, as it is not feasible to create significant value and IT transformation in a short period. Implementing one-year tactics instead of a strategy to meet deadlines and short-term goals is never a good idea to achieve true growth and transformation.
3. Assumptions, limitations and relevant requirements
If you try to get too detailed in your IT strategy, you risk making assumptions about the future. While it is important to think about your current capabilities and needs, remember that not all details will be relevant to the strategy. What matters is understanding what is required for a successful strategy and knowing what is not relevant now but could be in the future. It is important to include any considerations that have affected or may affect or shape your IT strategy shortly.
For example, whether or not a major market disruption is expected soon, whether some product lines are going to come or go, etc.
4. IT Vision Statement
An IT vision statement should act as a starting point for developing your strategy by stating what your business wants to achieve with IT or how you want to leverage technology to gain an advantage over competitors. Think of it as a detailed expression of the high-level goals of the business and how IT can help. If you already have a vision statement, it may help to update your current strategy to ensure that the goals are consistent.
Instead of focusing on the different ways things are done, focus on their capabilities when creating your IT vision statement. For example, a car company might have a vision statement: provide information to 500,000 self-driving cars per week.
5. Describe and prioritize the most important projects and initiatives
Your strategy should focus on the projects, initiatives, or priority areas that will deliver tangible business benefits and great results. Be sure to include a high-level justification for each project you intend to implement.
You can then prioritize them into three categories that will help you decide which IT projects should be the main focus, which initiatives should be postponed later, and which projects can be combined. It is also crucial to leave room for changes in your strategy when new projects or a new requirement make it imperative to change the strategy. An IT strategy should be considered a process that accounts for changes when necessary.
6. Deadlines for significant projects
A key part of your strategy is having precise deadlines for each project underway. You can do this by using Gantt charts to help you understand the dependencies between projects and how they impact each other. In a five-year IT strategy, be sure to assign more specific timelines in the early years. Your readers should have an idea of when they can expect the results.
7. Resources that are important
You should build your strategy on a realistic assessment of current and future staff capabilities and the availability of resources, including the ability to train, engage with vendors, and expand as needed. You can use an IT staffing plan as part of your IT strategy to map out the skills, roles, and responsibilities needed for success. This approach will help you see how many people are needed in each business area to deliver your IT vision.
8. Required important processes, technologies and infrastructures
IT strategy comes into play when you provide tools that enable staff members to complete their tasks with ease and precision. To achieve this for your business, you need to consider what systems or technologies will be needed to support it in the future.
For example, if your business is in the acquisition process, find out how many new servers, network infrastructure, appliances, telecommunication lines, and email posts would be required for new IT customers. Consider whether you are moving your infrastructure to the cloud, and if so, list what infrastructure, technologies, and processes you will need to support the elements of the strategy, along with when and how you expect to implement each element.
9. Business IT management
A large-scale, company-wide IT initiative is a business in itself, and therefore it’s important to brainstorm and decide how you’ll run that business. To successfully implement your IT strategy, you must have a clear understanding of what needs to happen internally to make it work. You may need to consider the following:
– The required roles for your IT services team (if you already have one)
– How decisions will be made
– How skills and technologies will be managed within your business – Any necessary process changes around technology release management, service management, or service desk practices
– How do you plan to change your relationships with IT service providers to support the move to a more strategic approach?
It’s important to recognize that IT strategy doesn’t exist in isolation – it must align with other business strategies and be consistent across all divisions of the company. Your IT strategy can be one of many different strategies, and in some organizations it can be a supporting strategy.
10. Budgets and expenses of strategic initiatives, Approval
Examine how you’ll pay for IT and digital transformations over the next five years. The budget and costs must be submitted in years 1-2, with estimates provided in years 3-5. This will help the reader see what the actual costs of your strategy are.
Getting management approval is the last step in developing an IT strategy. If management has been involved in developing the strategy throughout the entire process, it should be easier to get approval. You can use your developed IT strategy to help you manage your IT right now during your operational period.
Conclusion
Having an IT strategy shows that you have a clear understanding of where the organization is going and how to use technology to get there. Your IT strategy should be simple, clear, visual, easy to communicate among your business stakeholders, and relevant to your business goals. As IT solutions change over time, you’ll need to reset or update your IT strategy to ensure it continues to meet business needs.
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Categories: Technology
Source: vtt.edu.vn