Starting from Scratch

Ask Vicki Petit, vice president of information services for KI, a $US700 million office furniture manufacturer, what word she associates with IT strategic planning and she doesn't miss a beat: "Work," she answers, with a sigh.

Petit faced a double challenge when she became KI's CIO eight years ago. KI didn't have a business strategy and no one in IT had ever thought about creating one. Forrester's Cullen gets lots of calls from CIOs as mid-year approaches, and about half of them are just like Petit, starting from scratch. (The other half are dissatisfied with their current plan.) "[CIOs] all know they need one, but they're not sure what it is or what they want to achieve or where to start," says Cullen.

Petit spent her first few years on the job waiting for the business to decide what its strategic plan was. But what it delivered wasn't a plan; it was a tome. She waded through KI's 200-page "corporate strategy book" searching to find something that IT could align with. "The business strategy was communicated in mostly operational objectives," says Petit. She wanted to create a long-term road map that would guide IT beyond the next year but it was difficult to tie that to the nitty-gritty tactical goals that passed for business strategy.

Still, Petit knew she had to put some kind of stake in the ground, if only to make the following year's strategic plan a little easier. And every year since, she's put an IT strategic plan on paper, updating it and grading the IT department on its progress after six months, improving the process as she goes. And now her boss, the CFO, requires a similar strategic plan each year from all departments.

"Oh they love me," she jokes. But the plan has proven invaluable. "We can use what's in there to help us justify IT's direction or say no to a project instead of just reacting to what users want."

George Lin also had to go from zero to 60 on strategy. When he became CIO of Dolby Laboratories last April, he found a "fairly rudimentary" IT plan in place. But unlike Petit, he benefited from what he characterizes as a very strong business strategic planning process. Dolby has a multiphase "funnel" approach to strategic business planning. All the good ideas generated by the company's more than 1000 employees come in and the senior management has a governance process for narrowing them down to a manageable number of initiatives for the year.

Lin plans to introduce a similar process within IT, inviting broad input into the strategic plan and putting in place a "business infrastructure steering committee" to select those with the most promise. "It's what I've done everywhere I've been," says Lin, who previously held IT leadership roles at Advent Software, Documentum and EMC. "The IT strategic planning process should tie into the existing business strategic planning process. That creates buy-in from the business."

Without that, Lin says IT suffers. "Before I became a CIO, I saw the downside of an IT organization whose strategic plan was not aligned," says Lin. "IT was putting a lot of good effort into projects the business didn't want or appreciate. It becomes a morale issue," he says.

Tennant plans to mirror BLHS's new business strategy process when he creates the organization's first-ever IT strategic plan this year. Those "strategic positioning statements" the corporate team was developing? IT will have some, too. "They won't be, 'We're going to grow our staff 25 percent' or 'We'll upgrade to Watson version 9.0' like it has been'," says Tennant. "It could be, 'We're going to move in the direction of self-service', which could apply to our staff or the people we serve or our vendors. Or 'We're going to leverage adaptive technology to improve the lives of the people we serve'."