The IT Strategic Planning Process

Establishing the rationale

• Managing IT as a business
• Benefits of strategic planning for IT
• Making IT strategic planning a priority

Structuring the strategic planning process

• Key components of an IT strategic plan
• Defining a structured strategic planning process
• Engaging stakeholders in the decision-making process
• Leveraging best practices and Agile patterns

Analysing the Business Environment

Identifying the mission and competencies of your organisation

• Detecting internal sources of information
• Recognising external constraints and drivers

Assigning value and weight to enterprise objectives

• Filtering strategic from tactical initiatives
• Ranking objectives for maximum impact

Bridging the Gap

Reviewing established IT portfolios

• Categorising current projects and services
• Appraising the IT asset inventories
• Assessing current risks and performance
• Engaging enterprise architecture

Measuring your IT governance maturity

• Employing a structured governance model
• Identifying skills, roles and responsibilities
• Controlling regulatory elements
• Conducting a SWOT analysis

Aligning IT to your business objectives

• Comparing IT portfolios and governance against business objectives
• Isolating misaligned projects and services

Defining a Business-Driven IT Vision

Detecting candidate solutions and refining Critical Success Factors (CSF)

• Taking advantage of analytical and Agile techniques
• Leveraging your assessment results
• Mapping CSFs to business goals

Selecting the strategic initiatives

• Categorising initiatives against core values
• Managing costs and risks
• Reducing risks through Agile iterations

Establishing governance requirements

• Validating the alignment with the enterprise strategy
• Researching applicable compliance requirements
• Defining the decision and accountability framework

Preparing the IT Strategic Plan

Mapping initiatives to the goals of your organisation

• Fine-tuning the proposed initiatives
• Establishing business cases and technology opportunities

Defining an IT vision

• Establishing the IT mission
• Defining guiding principles
• Analysing technology opportunities

Budgeting the investment

• Estimating initiative resources and R&D
• Considering total cost of ownership (TCO)

Solidifying final decisions

• Employing decision matrices to help rationalise the candidate initiative prioritisation
• Selecting the final strategic initiatives
• Producing the final plan

Executing the IT Strategy

Communicating your plan

• Soliciting feedback from stakeholders
• Socialising the plan
• Getting support from senior management
• Achieving formal acceptance and commitment to the plan

Providing input to other activities

• Enabling implementation of key initiatives
• Developing tactical plans
• Updating project portfolios

Monitoring and improving the plan

• Establishing metrics to measure the efficiency of the portfolio
• Implementing an IT balanced scorecard
• Taking corrective actions and maintaining the plan in a timely manner