So far, CIOs' responses to this changing environment have been mixed. Some have continued with an orthodox IT strategy — although I've noticed that many do not stick to what they promise, thereby defaulting to a de facto strategy of their own. Others have abandoned having a strategy for IT, which is a reasonable proposition if the company is an expert consumer of IT and can bend the de facto strategies that its IT vendors and partners will attempt to impose.

Some CIOs (and I have been fortunate to work with a number of them) have taken the third approach. They are collaborating with their executive colleagues to formulate, ratify and execute a corporate strategy for exploiting IT. This is very different from the traditional IT-centric strategy that consists of tens or hundreds of pages of technically oriented diagrams and prose and can take months to develop. The business-defined strategy can be formulated in a few days and summarized on one page. It's easy for executives to understand, explore and remember, as well as apply to their everyday decisions.

A Strategy for the Future

This simple strategy has three sections: the strategic promise (the business outcome the strategy will achieve), key principles (fundamental truths that apply to every IT-related decision) and core tactics (the main things the company will do to execute the strategy, given the environment in which it must succeed).

Although each corporate strategy for exploiting IT is unique to the company it belongs to, all have some comparable features. Each is a bona fide corporate strategy, not that of a technology supplier or a group of technicians. With a promise to create maximum value from exploiting IT (not just deploying IT that enables value to be created), its first principle recognizes that IT, on its own, creates no value. To have a standalone IT investment budget is therefore illogical, so a core tactic is to integrate IT investments with the business plans that need them and proactively manage the big picture.

Such a strategy focuses primarily on the community of technology users, who, far from being shadow technologists, are the "new IT." Whereas traditional IT strategies were mainly about the IT department and its suppliers, the new strategy focuses on the people who shape, source and exploit their company's IT investments. Calling those people "shadow IT" exposes a mindset that is dangerously at odds with today's reality and risks further marginalizing the IT department from everyone else.