How to Get Real About Strategic Planning
- 04 February, 2008 12:50
- Comments
Oh, it must be nice to be the CIO of a FedEx or a GE or a Credit Suisse. Places where IT and the business are so tightly aligned you can barely tell the two apart. Where corporate leaders understand that IT is a strategic asset and support it as such. Where the CIO is encouraged to spend the majority of his time on the Big Picture. If one works in that kind of IT Wonderland, getting a good strategic plan down on paper is probably a snap.
But the vast majority of CIOs work in places where the business itself may not have a clearly articulated strategy. Where corporate leaders don't care too much for IT, much less value it strategically. Where the CIO's time is devoured by day-to-day operations and there's little time left to look beyond the next few months. If one lives with that kind of tactical IT reality, getting a good strategic plan down on paper is practically impossible.
Which is to say that for most CIOs, putting together an IT strategic plan - that annual road map to guide IT through the next 12 months and beyond - is dauntingly hard. (For more on what should go into it, see "Anatomy of an IT Strategic Plan", end of story)
But while the odds may be stacked against the average CIO, the truth is that those IT leaders who don't master the art of strategic planning won't last long. "The purpose of the IT strategic plan is to improve the business-IT relationship. A CIO needs it to communicate with the business, to tell them that he understands the company's needs and to set expectations," says Alex Cullen, Forrester Research vice president and research director. "A CIO can't succeed without it."
Michael Jones, CIO of the National Marrow Donor Program, calls it "the business case for IT". Here's how you can overcome the four most common obstacles to penning that increasingly critical document.
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.
- Bookmark this page
- Share this article
- Got more on this story? Email CIO
- Follow CIO on twitter
-
Monash Uni reduces IT teams after consolidation project
-
FTC warns makers of background checking apps
-
Time to get Agile
-
QLD govt demands answers after pay glitch
-
Monash Uni reduces IT teams after consolidation project
-
Improving Productivity in the Connected Enterprise Through Collaboration
In the market for collaborative applications, a large convergence is beginning to take hold, and the consumerization of IT is central to this movement. The technologies that people use as consumers are impacting the way employees, customers, and partners want to interact and collaborate at work. People want to take the same technology experiences that are available at home and plug them into their daily work lives. This movement is setting worker expectations as both employees and corporate consumers. Workers need to have the choice and flexibility to consume the applications they want, where they want, and on their preferred device. Read on. -
Two May Be Better Than One: Why Hard Disk Drives and Flash Belong Together
This white paper will explore the need for a caching and buffering technology between DRAM and HDDs and why Flash memory can be used to fill this need. We will go on to look at various ways that Flash and HDDs can be combined in a computer storage hierarchy. These technologies to combine Flash memory and HDDs include hybrid HDDs, Flash on the computer motherboard, and a combination of Flash and HDD storage devices in the same computer – paired storage systems. -
Web 2.0 in the Workplace Today
More than a decade after the term ‘Web 2.0’ was coined, many businesses are still nowhere near to taking full advantage of the collaborative technologies the term refers to. Undoubtedly, confidence is growing in relation to using tools such as Facebook, Skype, Twitter, and indeed many more organisations are using such technology now compared to even just a couple of years ago. But the fact remains that a worrying amount of businesses seem to be operating a ‘lockdown’ approach – an approach that I’m sure many Board-level staff know is simply not good for business in the long-term.
Get exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis. 
Comments
Post new comment