Business Plan? What Business Plan?

The cardinal rule in developing an IT strategy is to connect it to the business strategy. "The business should have desired outcomes - market share gains, higher customer satisfaction levels, shortened cycle times," says independent IT analyst Laurie Orlov. "IT has to figure out where they factor into that."

But for all the whining CIOs have had to endure about how IT needs to be more strategic, the businesses they support are often in even more dire strategic straits. "Businesses very often don't have a strategy. Or they do, but it's very high-level and vague. Or they reserve the right to change it. Or they have some strategies, but they don't apply to all the business activities taking place," says Forrester's Cullen.

So CIOs operating in strategy-free organizations are off the hook, right? Wrong. "It's the ultimate cop-out for CIOs to say they can't do an IT strategy because the business doesn't have an articulated strategy," says Orlov. Fuzzy business goals present a challenge, but smart CIOs should see that as an opportunity. "People in the business are very focused on operations or other minutiae," says Dave Aron, vice president and research director for Gartner Executive Programs. "IT can help the business articulate what will help it win and how IT fits into that. Then you go from just being an order taker to actually influencing overall strategy."

Opportunity Knocks

Michael Hites knew the lack of vision at New Mexico State University (NMSU) would be a challenge. "If you don't have the highest level plan in place, even the best IT strategic plan won't work," explains Hites. "I've seen it; I've lived it." When he became CIO in 2003, NMSU's plan was no different from any other school's. So Hites's first IT strategic plan was standard and risk-averse. IT plodded along doing good work but nothing particularly strategic. In the absence of a more ambitious university plan, there was nothing to anchor a real IT strategy, says Hites. "If you stick your neck out [in that environment], the university may or may not be behind you," he notes.

But then a funny thing happened. After several years of bugging people about the lack of a strategic plan for the university, Hites last year was put in charge of strategic planning for the entire university and named vice president of planning and technology.

Hites and his team have lots of great ideas - about $US15 million worth of them, he says - but his organization is "funded to the tune of half a million a year". The question he's faced with each year is "how to spend that little bit to do something strategic. If the university has the 'mom-and-apple-pie' strategy of 'helping students succeed' or 'increasing research', anything you do is going to foster those objectives. And you can never be sure you're making the right choices. But if a university steps out on a limb and says: 'We will have the best online education program in criminal justice in the world', then that becomes the strategic focus."