IT-Depends IT-Strategy

As my career had been progressing and evolving throughout many years, moving from purely technical software developer/ engineer, and falling in love with coding and for sure it has been in my blood till now (it is like a personal identity), technology related knowledge areas has been transforming with the speed of light. As my career shifted into different directions still related to technology, one of them is developing and executing technology and digital transformation strategies and programs.

I still remember my clients asking simple and valid questions; which one to develop first? Information Technology (IT) strategy or Digital Transformation strategy (which looks sexy nowadays)? And do we need to do both or do one of them that will achieve our business objectives? … my answer was very simple, spontaneous, and natural … IT DEPENDS on your business objectives and technology maturity of your organization.

To me IT strategy is more about the technology foundation, structure, and infrastructure of the organization. On the other hand, Digital Transformation strategy is about optimization processes through digitization (for simplicity its optimization through digitization).

Today, I will focus on how organizations can develop IT strategies in a simple, robust, and practical way.

As any strategy development exercise (the essence of it is change management), the steps to develop the strategy are embedded with three main phases; Current State Assessment “where are we now”, Future State Design “how we want to be”, and the Transition State “how we get there”. Each phase contains several steps and specifics inputs and outcomes which can be connected to each other.   

The current state assessment is all about understanding the existing corporate and business strategy and getting the required and critical knowledge about your business content, capabilities, strategy, and how the current IT is connected to your business and contributing in its success. On the other hand, it is important to verify the capability of current utilized technology and the relevant criticality to your business.  It is very important to align your technology strategy to the organization corporate and business strategies and the delivery of products and services.

The future state design is about deciding where the To-Be Technology will look like in your    organization for the next 3 or 5 years (it is always preferred to be 3 years maximum). After fully understanding your current state and have enough knowledge of the future technology of your organization; identification and documentation of the GAPs, Benchmarking analysis, and new Trends, is critical to be conducted to produce clear future SMART goals that make sense and realistic and can be implemented. 

It is crucial in this step to involve stakeholders from all levels of your organization and if you have a mobile workforce, you must involve workers and technicians in the field same as employees in the office. Remember always those are the people who will implement the strategy, so their input is very important and valuable.

How to implement your future state is through the transition state which is here where you decide how you reach your goals through specific and realistic transition plan. The plan must be tailored and customized to your organization culture and environment with crystal clear connection to the strategy goals and objectives. Robust change management plan and effective communications will make it much easier during strategy execution. The final report should be simple, concise, and short.

In conclusion, I have been advising my clients to develop the IT strategy if they have issues with technology maturity, systems, and data integration (they need to go back to roots and stick to the basics first before any digital transformation adventure), or if it is a startup business. I will focus on my next article about the Digital Transformation saga.