IT Strategy Services
Mark Walters
An effective IT Strategy must enable your business through improved customer service, cost savings to deliver improved profit and Innovation to drive revenue growth. It is also critical to ensure that your business is protected through an appropriate investment in IT availability and security. An IT Strategy is critical to providing clarity and a guiding star for technology teams and stakeholders alike. In today’s digital transformational age, technology is a key enabler for businesses and, on average, accounts for 3-5% of corporate budgets – so ensuring that this significant investment returns value is critical.
A business strategy, defining an organisation’s purpose, business goals and how they’ll be achieved, is commonplace. An IT strategy, describing the business’s future state in terms of technology, organisation and process along with a compelling business case explaining how these support the company’s business objectives and a plan for delivery, is equally important.
IT Corporate Strategy
The research and analysis undertaken during the development of both business and IT strategies enables an organisation to identify critical success factors and develop a plan to achieve them. A clearly defined strategy also provides an organisation with focus, enabling managers and staff to understand how they contribute to delivering strategic objectives and concentrate on the activities that support them. A robust governance framework, with strong leadership support and professional people and supplier management is also crucial.
It is a constant surprise that many organisations still have no IT strategy, either because they don’t see the need or lack the capability to create one. Of those who do, many report that it doesn’t deliver the anticipated value – often because the business doesn’t commit to its implementation. The reasons for this usually include one or more of the following:
- Poor alignment with the business strategy
- Narrow scope, limited to the technology
- Technical language, so the business can’t understand it
- Insufficient consideration of information security (threats, risks and controls)
- Understated costs and benefits, making the strategy appear weak
- Poor high-level implementation plan that’s limited to IT activity.
Expert IT Strategy Consultants
Our expertise has shown us that organisations with successful IT strategies have many of the following in common:
- Strategic planning is a joint activity, with business and IT leaders establishing a shared understanding of business goals, tactics and constraints and fully exploring the potential of IT to enable business success
- Business and IT focus on IT capabilities rather than features, products and protocols
- The business case and plan for IT-enabled business change include mechanisms to manage impacts on business operations and opportunities for the business to exploit the new IT
- The IT strategy is accessible and communicated clearly and regularly to staff, customers and suppliers/partners
- Recognition that resources are finite, so projects are prioritised according to value and likelihood of success.
- Dependencies across the portfolio are actively managed when making decisions about individual projects
- The IT strategy recognises that the journey to the future state begins in the present and reflects current strengths and weaknesses
- The journey is reviewed frequently, responding to disruptive events such as changes in markets or technology and is re-calibrated according to experience to date
- The IT strategy describes the organisational capability necessary to implement it, including costs and activities
- The future state of IT is described as a journey via a number of transitional states, aligned with planned milestones where decisions can be made to “do more”, “do different” or “stop”.
By doing more of the above, an organisation will increase its executives’ understanding of the relevance of the IT strategy and their support for it will grow. They will also understand how IT can work with the rest of the organisation to successfully deliver change projects and maximise their benefits.
Wasting time and effort isn’t the only consequence of producing an unimplemented IT strategy. Allowing IT to develop tactically is inefficient and wasteful, leading to poor solution choices that bring high overheads, duplicated activity and failed projects. It can even create difficult relationships between IT and business teams, diminishing the standing of IT leaders.
On the other hand, an IT strategy that’s adopted by the executive and used to drive delivery of the right IT capabilities transforms the value of IT to the organisation.
Why Does your Company need an IT Strategy?
Achieve Business Objectives:
understanding how IT should support digital transformation efforts is critical to enabling a long-term vision and building sustainable and future proof IT capabilities.
Gain Competitive Advantages:
strategic goals will indicate how your organisation will measure their future success. These business goals should be focused on determining opportunities that deliver competitive advantage – ecosystem marketplaces, IP exploitation, efficiencies and automation. Your IT strategy should help make these opportunity areas a reality.
Support Strategic Decision Making:
Your IT Strategy will deliver value to your business by focussing on cost, revenue and service and also inform your strategic priorities that will drive your investment cases and aid decision making. Your IT strategy must be simple, clear and well understand by all stakeholders to help business decision makers.
Why Peru’s IT Strategy Consulting?
Peru will help you align your IT Strategy to your Business strategy and the needs of your key stakeholders. We will cut through the hype of the latest technology trends so that you can create business growth through innovation. We work collaboratively across business and technology teams to ensure that the options and priorities are clear. This then enables agreement of the ‘To-Be’ state that will form the basis of the strategy. In addition, the market and technology insight that we bring can help you move from a technology enabler to a true driving force for the business.
We start by understand your business strategy and key drivers to ensure that the IT strategy will fully align to your business objectives.
Our industry experts will help you make sense of the latest IT Opportunities, Disruptions and Threats as well as a view of your competitive landscape.
We use proven techniques to identify the business demands existing systems, networks, people and skills. Giving a clear view of key risk and investment areas to both grow and protect existing services.
We also provide IT consulting services in order to help your organisation solve different problems and overcome different challenges.
We give your clear options and a strategy that delivers true value for your business.