A: An IT strategy is a plan to achieve specific IT goals and results. In short, it is a roadmap of what, when, and why, regarding the IT ideas/initiatives that have been agreed on between the business users and IT department.
These goals should be defined by both the business and IT department. They need to balance competing objectives from multiple departments, take into consideration the breadth of the goals, prioritize them, and reclassify accordingly.
Note
Who makes the ultimate decision on the prioritization depends on the organization's structure and internal politics. If the CTO/CIO report to the CFO, then the priorities tend to swing towards reducing costs. If the reporting structure is to the CEO, then the priorities reflect company growth. Additional priorities that may overlap into an IT strategy include marketing and brand recognition of the organization.
An IT strategy is a journey which leads to a series of milestones, perhaps defined and redefined quarterly, annually, or every five years (yes this is a long term in IT). These milestones should be shared among all senior management, employees, and contractors involved in the projects.
It is not a single meeting and a series of PowerPoint slides to impress management that are then e-mailed to a group.
For the purpose of this chapter, typical strategies could be aligned with your organizational goal, along with the assumption that most of the IT goals aid business operations.
These goals are stated in two lists as follows. The first is business-centric, whereas the second set is more IT-centric. It is how an IT strategy should be defined and implemented:
Other examples of goals, which could also be classified as objectives or subgoals, may include the following:
Enable wide adoption of application
Invest in platforms that are easier to maintain
Reduce overall maintenance costs
Both sets of goals are equally important not just in what is actually being delivered but also in the timing of each goal.
Note
The most important goal is not that the SharePoint application was delivered on time, but that a user adoption level was reached at a certain point. This is a key issue with SharePoint applications.
The following figure illustrates a deployment using the strategic approach. The strategy is split into definable phases and goals with a defined end date. Notice how some of the activities (Projects, Adoption, Organization, IT, and Infrastructure) of the phases are split between business and IT initiatives.
Some of the goals are continuous to the endpoint of May 2013 as illustrated. Of course, additional phases can be added to the IT strategy.
It is recommended that, at the end of each phase, a meeting should be held among IT personnel and the business to discuss the phase that has ended, identify successes, failures, and how improvements can be made for the next phase. This post mortem review process should be documented, and applied to the next steps.