CUSTOMatrix™ Insights Newsletter

The Case for:

Strategic Plans for Business-Aligned Organizations

Brynley Lee, Associate, IT Services, CUSTOMatrix, Inc.

A Strategic Plan for any Information Technology (IT) organization is an essential tool for running a proactive, business aligned operation. It is a purpose-driven, living plan whose structure and content are tailored to complement IT governance structures and processes while driving vision, anticipating need and justifying cost. If originally completed correctly, and consulted, reviewed and updated regularly, it will provide steadfast long-term direction while maintaining relevancy. Even in the near term, it will save the organization hard dollars in terms of increased efficiency and productivity as well as more cost-effective, better aligned systems.

Successful IT organizations use an IT strategic plan to achieve specified results across IT and to align those priorities across the business. With an effective strategic plan, IT will be well positioned to communicate priorities, implement strategies and initiate risk-mitigation tasks. One of the key benefits of a good strategic plan is to level set expectations against budgets, timelines, resources and other tactical impediments to planned – or even unexpected - change.

What Does A Good Strategic Plan Accomplish?

For The Business

A good strategic plan is one of the best vehicles for setting business expectations and improving understanding of the role IT plays in both supporting and driving the business. Without a strategic plan, IT will be challenged to meet the business’ expectations for maintaining or updating current systems, implementing new systems, providing acceptable levels of maintenance and support or staying current on technology trends in order to keep costs down. And business groups who rely on IT will be frustrated if they don’t understand the legitimate constraints and limited capacity faced by IT. This lack of mutual understanding and unaligned expectations is a frequent root cause of discord between IT and the business. And in today’s world, organizations whose IT and business units are not in alignment are wasting precious dollars which could be used in more productive ways.

For Management

With IT a significant operating expense as well as one of the largest categories of capital expense, executive management and many boards look for evidence of both investment alignment with organizational priorities and adequate governance, resource skill, technology stability and oversight controls to ensure that expenditures are spent prudently. They need to see and understand a big picture view of IT and where/how IT can support the organization’s vision and future – not just spend on projects, software or hardware and not just budget for operations. They need visibility into IT as an asset that can be applied to far reaching organizational priorities. Perhaps just as compelling, they need to understand the role IT plays in ensuring risk mitigation and disaster recovery. A good IT strategic plan offers the best way to ensure that these understandings and expectations are proactively accounted for. It also ensures that IT garners credibility and the support of executive management.

For The IT Organization

The IT Strategic Plan brings clear benefits to the business organization and to executive management but it is most beneficial to the IT organization itself. It brings coherence across the IT organization by providing clear direction and priorities. Frequently, IT organizations can fall into the non-productive routines and bad habits of time wasting, working at cross purposes, being in a permanent reactionary mode of operation, treating everything as urgent and skill degradation – all of which can best be described as “spinning the wheels.” There’s a lot of activity, everyone is busy and people appear to be working very hard but there is little measurable forward progress. Too often, IT responds with urgency to the latest and loudest service request first, whether or not that issue warrants priority service. While this may appear to be normal or even desirable to a business user who only views IT as a support organization, it is in reality counter to the best interests of all the stakeholders of the greater organization. In this scenario, high-value, strategic concerns rarely get the attention they deserve while precious time and resources are deployed to address tactical issues. This amounts to piling up the risk to the organization at a compounding rate and carelessly allowing the organization to drift closer to a day of potential reckoning if unexpected catastrophes strike and there is no plan for recovery. A good IT Strategic Plan will serve to mitigate such risks.

Specific Benefits to the Enterprise Organization of an IT Strategic Plan

In summary, the business (or customer) needs the IT Strategic Plan to:

Demonstrate understanding of their business and their goals and constraints;
Set their expectations on what they can reasonably expect from IT in terms of service levels;
Clarify the rules and norms under which IT operates and make them aware of the impact on IT of governance, prioritization and allocation of resources; and
Build their understanding of and confidence in IT.

Executive Management needs the IT Strategic Plan to:

Confirm that IT is aligned with organizational directives and priorities;
Communicate and demonstrate the justification and rationale behind IT budgetary and long-term investment needs;
Describe governance controls; and
Ensure that the organization can emerge relatively unscathed from a catastrophe.

IT needs the IT Strategic Plan to:

Clarify its own expectations as to what its main mission is and what it needs to do to perform well and be successful;
Give itself direction and a process that allows for “room to maneuver” or an ability to balance new and conflicting demands on the IT organization, without damaging IT’s ability to deliver;
Justify investments in IT in terms of demonstrating a return on those investments; and
Educate the rest of the organization as to what IT is, how it operates and how it benefits the organization as a whole.

Consequences of a Poor or Non-Existent Strategic Plan

An IT organization may appear to be successful, or may even avoid failure for a while without a strategic plan but it is always at risk that quick responses to non-strategic issues will create a damaging legacy of short-term workarounds. Even worse, this can create a climate of unrealistic service level expectations being the norm. Typically, as IT reacts to one set of needs, other groups within the enterprise will have no visibility into what’s next on IT’s to-do list and may not care as they only see their own needs as requiring IT’s attention. In this scenario, it’s very difficult for IT to be successful and fulfill its role and obligation as a strategic business partner.

Frequently, the lack of an IT strategy will mirror the lack of a business strategy and IT organizations will try to “make do” by operating in a collaboration, not planning model. But with growth or any other kind of organizational change, the collaboration model cannot scale to the change in any coherent way without the direction provided by a plan. Without a plan, IT’s stakeholders don’t know what IT’s capacity is and can’t know where their needs fit within IT’s capacity. More importantly, stakeholders are more likely to see what IT delivers as disconnected actions with no coherence and relevance to their perceived priorities.

Conclusion: Decreasing Risk (Costs) and Increasing Return (Benefits)

Technology is interwoven into all of an organization’s activities and the need to continuously support and update that technology is as strategic a task as any that exists within the organization, from ensuring the phones work to getting the payroll out to keeping the website updated to ensuring the servers and computers are always running and safe from cyber attacks and so on. Thus, the organization’s strategic direction, operations, growth, costs and external market or governmental pressures, as well as the organizational attitudes towards risk and technology are all inescapable backdrops to IT actions. Without a documented repository providing a context for all of these influences, factors and truths, IT’s activities will appear to be disconnected from the organization’s plans and direction making it run much less efficiently in the process. This frequently results in negative side effects and unintended consequences for the business as a whole. An IT Strategic Plan is a proactive, low cost and very effective way to ensure that an organization is prepared to decrease risk and cost and increase productivity and organizational cohesion over both the near and long-terms.

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