Step #1: Look at the role of key players

The first steps towards building a successful IT strategy is to find out who are the key decision makers in your company. These decision makers create their own short-term and long-term plans to grow the business. While creating those goals, they do consider the present and future market scenarios. They also look at the existing competition and consider adopting the newer technologies to run faster.

A typical organization structure will have the following key roles:

• Chief Executive Officer/Managing Director (CEO or MD)
• Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
• Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
• Chief Strategy Officer (CSO)
• Chief Information Officer (CIO)
• And then a bunch of roles reporting to them.

While the CSO closely work with the CEO/MD and CMO, the CFO plays a vital role in determining the scale of investment. Every business strategy, has at a minimum, three important inputs – (a) how did we do last year, (b) what do we want to do next year and over the next 5 years and (c) how much money do we invest. While point (a) and (b) are driven by the CSO and CMO, for point (c), CFO determines the goal. Remember, IT Strategy is only a business driver. So, it is important to take a note of these key decision makers and work with them to safely chalk out the IT landscape. Otherwise, be ready for an abrupt failure.

Step #2: Take a note of the business goals

If you have noted the role of the key people in your organization, now it is time to talk to them and then understand their individual goals which eventually roll-up to the organizational goal. You need to talk to each individual upto a certain level on a one-on-one basis. The following questions should be asked during the conversation. These questions are only a set of sample questions. Feel free to ask more questions relevant to your organization.

1. What is the perception about last year’s performance?
2. What are the top 5 factors that have influenced growth or downfall?
3. How do you see yourself compared to the competitors? Name 5 important points that you feel the competitors have achieved which you haven’t.
4. Out of those 5 important points, what in your opinion, can be tackled using technology? (help the person understand this question better by giving examples related to process improvement)
5. What are the top 5 priorities of next year?
6. What are the top 5 priorities for the next 5 years?
7. Give 5 different instances where you feel that certain business related information could have helped you take decisions better. They were available, but were not so easily.
8. Do you feel that the company is losing its confidential information because of employee attrition? (few examples can help understand the situation better)
9. Do you feel that the productivity of employees have suffered (moderately/significantly) over the past year? Give 5 instances where employee hardship played a negative role on company’s performance.
10. Did you face any technology outage over the past 1 year? If yes, how did that impact your business. (certain instances is going to be helpful)
11. Did anyone from technology meet you last year and ask you about your business goals? Do you feel that any of your suggestions were given any priority this year? (document this in details)
12. So far as internal processes are concerned, do you think that there are some repetitive processes and they are unnecessarily taking time? Will it help if technology is used to automate them to some extent?
13. How did the customer satisfaction index improve over the last 1 year? Is there a formal survey conducted to understand what the customers feel? (capture this in details)

Now, let’s look at each question and see how you are going to interpret them. You should create a worksheet and logically plot each question and try to qualify each answer with a rating or score. These ratings will eventually help you determine a summary scorecard to designate the present scenario and you can come-up with a target score.

1. Perception is beyond reality and it captures the mind of the individual you are talking to. Even if the numbers indicate growth of the business, the individual may have a different perception. You need not agree or disagree to these views. But it is important for you to understand the variations that exist within the company and how they impact the ultimate IT strategy.
2. When you listen to the top 5 growth parameters that the individual has considered, take a closer look at them and see what all were possible because of technology. If there are failures cited, see if there are technology elements which have contributed to the top 5. This will guide you to either consider taking some of the technology initiatives forward or scrap them as early as possible.
3. Competitor analysis is a great way of seeing what others have done but you haven’t. If there are 5 companies selling Apple of the same grade, but 2 of them have outnumbered the business growth of the others, see what makes them succeed. Apart from core production, there can be significant improvements in the delivery mechanism. Customer connects can play a role. Do a complete survey.
4. Now, this is very important. When you listen to some of the key points which can be tackled using technology, you will know what to do next. There is nothing better than a key stakeholder talking about technology and how it is going to help.
5. With the top 5 priorities of the person that you are talking to you, you will eventually come up with a long-term IT roadmap. If you are interviewing more than 10 individuals, you will often find varied priorities and a mix of these priorities will actually result in ultimate business goal.
6. Short-term goals or sometimes known as ‘low hanging fruits’ are the easy targets to satisfy the leadership. During your discussion when you listen to some of these low hanging fruits, consider them for immediate action. See how technology can drive these initiatives to the fullest extent.
7. This question is extremely important. If a leader faces challenges in extracting information from the system when there is an urgency, it indicates a gap in terms of what the business wants and what the technology can provide. Business decisions taken at the boardrooms are often based on various analytical data extracted out of the existing system. You will notice, leaders at the boardroom often asking for some information and you will have a great bit of difficulty in extracting that information. Finally when you extract that information, someone else in the boardroom will present a different set of data contradicting your own data. This indicates the presence of multiple sources of data within the technology network. You should always look for such instances and should always target single source of data (or sometimes known as Single Source of Truth).
8. Though I shall talk about Information Security as part of a different post, but consider this question as part of the business strategy. Companies often lose out on market competition because of their own employees leaving and passing some critical information to the competition. Treat this question important if there are specific instances. Not necessarily all the employees pose data risk and hence it may not be relevant in your case.
9. If you have deployed stricter technology controls for the employees in terms of what they can do with their system and their access policies and rights, sometimes these can become very dangerous and can impact the overall productivity. During your interview, ask about instances where employee productivity has impacted business delivery.
10. The Marketing Manager had to submit a very important bid and he was very sure of winning the same. Unfortunately, the internal IT system went down miserably and the Manager couldn’t submit the bid. It was a big loss for the company. During your interview session, ask if there are similar instances.
11. If you have conducted a similar IT Strategy program last year, it is possible that someone might have already asked similar questions last year. Now, it is important for you to get hold of those details. You should know what was asked, what was replied, what the final strategy was and if there was a success. It is best to avoid repeated failures.
12. During your conversation, ask about inefficient business processes and if there are any views about automating some of these processes. Companies can sometime inject delays purposely to mitigate certain risks. But it is worth knowing if there are ways to improve process inefficiencies by using technology.
13. Customers play a critical role in determining the strength of your business. The voice of the customers is important and needs to be heard. All social channels should be hooked. All applications that directly interact with your customers must be analyzed to see where customer discomfort lies.

Step #3: Create a laundry list of future action plans

Bases on your discussion in Step #2, you should come-up with a list of action items. Let’s discuss about how to create that list of action items.

Every person that you met during your one-on-one session have given you 4 things:

• What were good things
• What went wrong
• What will help them in the short-term
• What do they want to do over the next 5 years

With the good things that they talked about, you are surely going to continue with those. Keep a note of those projects which have positively impacted the business.

The things which negatively impacted the business should not be removed immediately. Take a look at the details of why they negatively impacted and certainly look at user training issues. Initiatives often fail because of lack of proper training. Some of the reasons you may look at if few of the past initiatives have not resulted in positivity:

1. User training issues: The application was rolled out without a proper training.
2. Wrong business alignment issue: The users wanted something, but end-product is delivering something else.
3. Long implementation issue: You may find that the project is running for quite some time and the users are losing interest. Shorter implementation cycle always helps in achieving goals.
4. Tactical issue: The developer(s) or the third-party vendor who were developing the product have either left or terminated their contract making the product hang in the middle.

Now, if consider the above points, you will be able to find out the cause of failure and if there are actions possible to revive the projects so that investments already made is protected.

Step #3.1: Filter out the short-term actions

Short-term goals are the easy catches. They not only excite you, but in reality they bring-in the fastest return on investment. Quick actions result in much greater user satisfaction. They are highly measurable.

During your discussion with the business leaders, find out the areas which can be delivered within a short span of time, preferably within 8 to 10 month’s of time. They need to be very small units of deliverables with higher impact on business. They must not cost very high and must be associated with lower risks.

Step #3.2: Filter out the long-term actions

Not everything is doable within a short span of time. Larger projects require much deeper discussions, buy-in from the users, much detailed scope and a very detailed investment plan. However, you should line-up those projects and use your own estimation tool to find out those details. But remember to note down the business benefits that are expected out of these projects. Those benefits should be measurable to some extent.

Step #4: Revisit the IT budget and goals

You need to rework on your IT budget based on what you discovered during your conversation explained in Step #2. When you analyze the conversation and plot them against the priorities of the company, in most of the cases your target IT infrastructure may change.

Let’s take an example. You might have thought of revamping the customer portal and the related mobile application so that it can have a modern feel and a lot of new functionalities. However, during your discussion, you discovered that customers are not interested in new portal. They are already satisfied with what they are getting and and it would be an overkill to really do something different, specially newer portals bring-in ‘visual shocks‘ as part of the change. Rather, during your conversation, someone told you that it is important to support the sales team with 4 different analytical reports which required you to integrate 3 different systems. Business priorities are to be given utmost importance and your IT budget need to swing towards more constructive business oriented deliverables.

So, when you look at your IT budget, there will be at a minimum, couple of broad expenditure types:

1. Budget to ‘Keep The Lights On‘ (KTLO): All expenses related to annual maintenance and support, electricity, cooling infrastructure, network expenses, cloud infrastructure, consumables etc. These are mostly operational expenditures, but there can be some capital expenses as well.
2. Budget for ‘New Lights‘: All expenses related to newer projects/initiatives. Almost all of them are of capital expenditures.

Now, keeping in mind that the newer initiatives will eventually add up to the KTLO bucket list next year, your budget should be crafted very carefully. While IT expenditure limit varies between companies, a percentage of revenue is what should drive your IT budget every year. Some sectors keep this between 3% to 5% of the net revenue. Very matured organizations spend as much as 8% towards IT budget. Now this spend mostly depends upon your industry/sector. Read more about managing IT budget in my other post.

Step #5: Identify the risks/impediments

You may have come-up with some great ideas to align IT with the business. However, it won’t be that easy getting your way through the corporate wall. Remember, there will be a crowd who will resist your idea no matter how good these are. Take those resistances positively and work on making sure that they are given least attention in your overall IT roadmap. The other way to tackle such issues is to take the crowd along with you and make them a part of the success. There are several risks that you will encounter once you put your plans into play.

• If you have planned for implementing a project, do you have enough documentation to support the requirement? Vague requirements are often a big concern.
• Have you constructed a methodology to measure the performance of the projects that you are going to implement? Nobody will care if your project is ‘bad’ as long as the results show it otherwise.
• Do you have the final buy-in from the user department? Don’t proceed any further if you can’t get a nod from the user department.
• Do you have enough IT budget to take care of the expenses? Don’t take chances if your budget is not supporting you for the new initiatives.
• Do you have enough internal resources to take care of the program management issues? If you don’t, consider getting third-party help.

Considering all of the above, you must formulate a IT Risk Mitigation Strategy. You may read my post on Risk Mitigation Strategy to understand this in details.

Step #6: Create the draft strategy

With all the information you have collected so far including the risks that you may encounter, you are now in a better position to take care of the final action points. However, it is important to keep in mind that IT strategy plays a significant role in determining the future of business and hence it is important to revisit your goals and see if it aligns with the organizational goal.

A number of points you need to consider while drafting the strategy. Below are few of them:

1. Technology Governance: Consider writing details about Technology Governance that you will be implementing while carrying out the Technology Strategy. Governance around Program Management, Stakeholder Management, People Management, Data Management, Risk Management, Regulatory Compliance etc. Read my detailed post on Technology Governance.
2. IT Security: Technology Strategy should also consider the IT Security aspect of it. Not all the companies require the same set of security infrastructure. Depending upon your business portfolio, different types of security infrastructure is required to safeguard your business. Accordingly write details about your plan to secure your data, network access permissions, work from home strategy, anti-virus policy, OS patch policy and much more. Read more about IT Security in my other post.
3. IT Budget: Ensure that you have captured all the elements around IT costs. No surprises will be welcomed during the middle of the year. If you have confusion as to who will take care of certain cost elements, go and discuss with the Finance and get a clarity. But never leave things hanging around without any ownership. Read more about IT Budgeting in my other post.
4. Performance Measurement: Consider writing a detailed methodology on how will you measure the performance of your projects. Measuring success as well as failure is important so that your future projects can be built based on these learnings.

Step #7: Get buy-in from the CFO

Once you have your draft Strategy ready, now it is time for you to get the cost elements validated with the CFO. The CFO has the overall picture of current fund and future predictions. So, it is important to get your Strategy certified by the CFO so that cash flow is never an issue going forward. Remember to set-out milestone based cash outflow for your all new projects. The CFO will definitely have views on how and who certifies those milestone achievements. Remember to document them as well.

Once your draft Strategy is certified by the CFO, you know that half of your job is done.

Step #8: Get buy-in from the CEO

The CEO has the bird-eye’s view of the entire organization and he/she knows what will make or break the success. You should present your draft Strategy to the CEO and take him through each of the following points:

• Details of your interviews with the business leaders – what they mentioned and what is your interpretation. The CEO might voice out a different view on some of the points and you need to take a note of them.
• Details of your roadmap and how they link-up to the voice of the business leaders. Talk about how each of the elements on the roadmap will positively impact the business.
• Details of short term and long terms priorities.
• Details of how you are going to ensure overall Technology Governance once the Strategy is given a final go ahead.
• Details of how you are going to measure the success.

The CEO may give you a different perspective compared to some of the business leaders. You need to consider all the views and revise your IT Strategy roadmap based on all the inputs. Prepare your final Strategy document based on all the inputs you have received.

Step #9: Present to the leadership team

Your entire IT Strategy program needs to be presented to the entire leadership team. You will notice something amazing. So far, you have been talking to all the individuals on a one-on-one basis. When you share the entire Strategy in front of everyone, there will be cross verifications and there will be instances when one leader may interpret the views of another leader differently. No matter how challenging the task is, the final goal should be to get the buy-in from the leader so that nobody complains about any of the projects later on. You may have to tweak the final Strategy based on the inputs you receive in the leadership meeting. But make sure that minutes are circulated on the changes made.

Step #10: Get it going

Once you have your final Strategy ready, it is time to execute it without losing any time. By the time you will get your final Strategy ready, you may have already crossed the time limits of many projects. Never mind, just start them and finish them as soon as you can and ensure that your IT Governance is in place to take control of the IT Strategy.

Time to give some feedback

While you have spent your precious time reading through the article, it is also important for me to receive continuous feedback from you so that I can improve my articles. Will you consider spending few more seconds to fill up the following feedback form for me? Really appreciate your time.