Tips for creating an IT strategy, DIY-style

Dear Bob …

As CIO, I’m responsible for developing our IT strategy. I’m under pressure from my boss (the CFO) to create one, and I hear quite a few rumblings from the IT staff that they’re impatient with our not having one, too.

[ Want to cash in on your IT experiences? InfoWorld is looking for stories of an amazing or amusing IT adventure, lesson learned, or tales from the trenches. Send your story to offtherecord@infoworld.com. If we publish it, we’ll keep you anonymous and send you a $50 American Express gift cheque. ]

One problem: The executive team hasn’t seen fit to publish a business strategy. It seems kind of hypocritical to me, and even if it isn’t, I don’t see how I can develop an IT strategy without a business strategy to point me in the right direction.

Before I push back publicly, I’d like to know what you think about the subject.

– Waiting

Dear Waiting …

I think you’re in a common situation, your response to it isn’t at all unusual — and your reason for waiting doesn’t hold water. There are a lot of reasons businesses don’t have formal strategies. For example, the current approach seems to be working just fine, so the “strategy” is to keep on doing it. However, it isn’t how I’d recommend running a company. Like ignoring preventive maintenance, it’s something that works until it doesn’t.

In the meantime, I’ll bet you know everything you need to know about the business strategy, whether or not anyone has written anything down — that is, IT’s job is to help everyone in the company do what they’ve been doing, only better than how they’ve been doing it, through the appropriate use of information technology.

Here’s one way to approach setting IT strategy:

Component No. 1: Remediation. You and your leadership team should know where IT is currently weaker than it should be. It might be in skills, attitude, methodology, the technical architecture as a whole, or one or two seriously obsolete and inadequate applications.

Component No. 2: Missing capabilities. You read the trade press (otherwise, you wouldn’t know who I am to ask a question), which means you know what’s going on in the IT industry. In turn, I hope this means you can envision what one or two key pieces might do for your company if you were to make them widely available and people in the business were able to figure out — with IT’s help — how to make productive use of them.

Component No. 3: Divisional plans. With or without a strategy, the various divisions, departments, business units, or what have you will put requests for new IT capabilities into the queue. Divide these into two categories: those that call for new capabilities and those that don’t. The ones that don’t — that only need more of the same of what you’re already good at — don’t feed your strategic plan, though they should make your annual plan. As for the ones that call for new capabilities, if you don’t already have those covered in Component No. 2, add them in.

Component No. 4: IT strategic plan. Your strategic plan consists of projects to fix known weaknesses in your organization and the technology it already supports, plus the projects and activities needed to build the new capabilities you know the business needs from you.

In case this point isn’t entirely obvious: To be a plan, it needs identified staffing, a budget, and a timetable. Without employees, money, and time, a plan is nothing but talk.

Write all this down in an organized way, turn it into a PowerPoint presentation, title it “IT Strategic Plan,” show it to the executive team, and see if they’ll fund it. If they do, you have an actionable IT strategic plan. If not, at least you’ll have called their bluff.

– Bob

This story, “Tips for creating an IT strategy, DIY-style,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.