If the business isn't involved, the most well-intentioned, well-conceived IT strategic plan can go south in a hurry. "You show the plan to the business, they nod their head, say: 'Sounds like a good plan you've got there, go do it'," says Forrester's Cullen. "Meanwhile they're thinking: 'Why'd you tell me this? It doesn't involve me at all. And don't ask me for money for it because it's not linked to business needs.'" Devoting 10 pages of the strategic plan to IT's goals for Web 2.0 might seem like a good idea within the IT department. Problem is, the CFO you're presenting it to is upset that his e-mail box is restricted to 100 megs and "you end up with the thing CIOs are most afraid of when they present their plan: people scratching their heads", says Cullen.

Hites now holds an annual IT planning conference at New Mexico State every October, meeting with a crowd of about 100 IT and university leaders. Last US autumn, they spent a lot of time talking about what Facebook and MySpace meant for the school and whether the curriculum should be integrated with such social networking sites. The conferences are something he started at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

"Before that, we did planning only internally," says Hites, "but that generated some tension. It was interpreted as, central IT wants us to do this while we want to do this other thing," says Hites. "It was ineffective."

Bringing the business into the strategic planning process doesn't have to be as formal a process as Hites's. Jones of the National Marrow Donor Program does it by having conversations with stakeholders. "I talk to people from the C level on down to the basement. I ask them how things are operating, what works well, what doesn't work well," he says. He then asks people in IT the same questions, which either validates his accumulated information or reveals disconnects that need to be explored.

These conversations help Jones "connect what's in the IT plan to the everyday needs of people in business terms".

"The CIO can go to peers and say: 'What do you expect from IT?' 'What's the importance of technology?'" says Cullen. "If the answer is: 'I don't know what I want because I don't know what you're capable of', then that may be the focus on the IT strategic plan this year: defining the role of IT."

"If you walk in with a blank sheet of paper, you may walk out with a blank sheet of paper," says Aron. "Instead say: 'We think you're in this kind of business, this is what it will take for you to win and this is what IT can do to help you. Is that right?'

"It's not bad to get it wrong," Aron adds. "Sometimes a wrong or controversial hypothesis will get them talking." For example, a bank CIO could walk in to the VP of customer service and say; "From what I understand, the bank is going to succeed based on its superior understanding of the customer so we think IT should focus on analytical customer relationship management." That VP may say: "No, we're going to win those customers by being low-cost." Now the CIO has something solid around which to build an IT strategic plan.