5. Thou Shall Not Consider the Wrong Issues

Most IT strategies come from a technology perspective and are limited to addressing technology improvements, says Peter Gasparovic, director at Sydney-based Lucidity Solutions. Very few take into account current business issues and even fewer provide businesses with the opportunity to unlock innovative potential for business efficiency. “More importantly, new ways for business to promote, sell and deliver products and services are generally overlooked,” Gasparovic says. “Usually, IT strategies are a three-year plan that does align closely when developed, but takes three years to deliver with little flexibility for change. That is why we find that between the two to three-year point of the IT plan, business and IT are often not aligned.

“The reality is, once the business executives have agreed to the IT strategic plan, they want it delivered quickly. Therefore, IT executives are required to be dynamic in delivery and should be developing strategies that can be rapidly executed to overcome current business issues. The flow-on effect of this is that it achieves benefits for the business and credibility for the IT department. This in turn will go a long way in obtaining much needed influential credibility for the innovative projects.”

Taking strategic decisions without reference to existing situations is common but fraught with peril, Gartner’s Roberts says. Using the analogy of a road map, if you decide to travel to Cairns, Cairns then becomes your strategic destination, but that decision won’t get you far unless you know where you are now. “One of the other weaknesses I see in strategic plans is that people don’t really focus on where they’re starting from, so they say: Oh look: there’s a CRM road, I think all have one of those. And so they pick some technology solutions without recognizing the change involved from where they are today to where they want to be.”

6. Thou Shall Not Perpetuate Misalignment

Many common failures in strategic IT planning are a direct result of IT not being linked into the larger organization’s planning efforts, with strategic planning usually undertaken as separate exercises with only cursory checks for continuity and agreement on meaningful measures, says Corinna Martinez, project manager at California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Moreover, IT is frequently not held accountable for either sticking with the plan or its progress in the face of operational emergencies and tactical changes which subsume the IT organization — usually the result of little ongoing support for updating technology.

And Martinez says trouble also arises when the rest of the organization doesn’t support the IT portion of the strategic plan: sneaking in requests, demanding more services and products, and looking the other way when IT governance or policies are invoked.

“The most profound strategic IT failures occur when the technology program is not deeply aligned with and driven by the business strategy of the organization,” agrees William Gellatly, a technology consultant from Toronto, Canada.

“The challenge to CIOs and their teams is to develop their organizations to the point where they can both efficiently deliver support to current business programs and adapt with agility equal to that of the business leaders in the face of evolving opportunities and pressures. These two characteristics are not specifically incompatible; however a deep optimization in one direction will generally result in severe non-optimization in the other,” Gellatly says.

“Locking in particular technology architecture around current-state business imperatives can create opportunities for vendor and resource cost minimization as well as driving out novelty, and hence risk. However that organization will be decidedly unready to respond to shifts — either major or minor — in business direction resulting from the ongoing evolution of the marketplace and environment. On the other hand, building a deeply mutable IT program that can be redefined on the fly can preclude optimizing for cost containment (business efficiency) and will typically increase novelty and hence risk in implementing projects.”

An effective IT strategy will be based on a detailed and fact-based situation appraisal of the aforementioned factors within the target organization and the resultant recommended balancing across program parameters must be accepted and supported by the organization leadership team, Gellatly says.

Then there is the tendency to over-promise and under-deliver as a way of business between IT and the rest of the organization, exacerbated by organization politics, merger/acquisition shuffling, and a lack of accountability by those holding the reins who use their golden parachutes to drift to their next C-level gig leaving the organization in shambles, Martinez says. On top of this, governments particularly can often be plagued by the weight of bureaucracy, with the consequent emphasis on counting requests; times to fulfil versus effectiveness in solving problems; satisfaction with process; and results achieved, making it difficult to operate and be more customer-oriented.

“All that said, each of these can be overcome but not solely by the IT organization,” Martinez says. “Change management and organization setting — expectations, values, goals — must occur before these problems can start to lessen. IT must become a part of the organizational fold and not a tack-on service or whipping boy.”

Ultimately, it is the execution and delivery of services that matter most in IT and will always be the priority,” Martinez says. “Until the strategic plans can make a difference on a consistent basis for that execution and delivery, few will pay it more than lip service.”

7. Thou Shall Not Fail to Commit

There are amusing parallels between the practice of strategic planning and that of engaging a personal trainer, says BlueFreeway CIO Simon Spencer. Getting the personal trainer is a positive starting point, while developing a road map and then starting the workout program to bring about change are all important steps, Spencer says. The issue, as we all know, is that following the road map, like following a workout program, demands commitment over the longer term, and this is where many efforts come unstuck.

“Taking the metaphor one step further, good strategic planning is often painful at some level, makes recommendations that are possibly a stretch at first and confronting,” Spencer says. “In the same way that you need to push through and take onboard the good advice of a qualified personal trainer to bring about the change in lifestyle that you may be looking for, so too does the strategic planning process fail if it just generates a PowerPoint that describes safe, incremental, status quo recommendations and directions that were already self-evident.

“By misalignment between the IT and the organization’s strategies I am referring to the fact that sometimes there is a difference between the organization’s direction and the perception that the people in IT have about it. Most times this is due to the lack of communication but other common causes include the lack of understanding — by any party — of IT’s role and importance within the organization, as well as the know-it-all attitude of some heads of IT. And I was one of them once — it is kind of a maturity process.”