It is easy to define an IT strategy - indeed, any strategy. There are good frameworks and decision methodologies for strategies.
The challenges, however, are:
- How to ensure that the strategies are aligned to the goals and workings of the wider ecosystem. For example, we need to make sure that the IT strategy is aligned to the business strategy; we need to align the business strategy to the market trends, competition, economy, regulation, and to the strategy of our partners and customers.
- How to make these strategies executable? How to connect them with all the elements of execution? How to create a roundtrip or feedback mechanism?
For example, how easily can you answer the following questions?
- What is the impact of a strategy on your partners?
- Which IT applications help execute your strategy and to what extent? How should your team enhance these applications in order to support your strategy?
- Which projects are in progress now that support the business strategy? What is the impact of the health of these projects on the strategies?
- How likely are you to achieve the strategic objectives?
- If the attrition of customers of a product line or service line is trending up, which strategic objectives are impacted negatively?
There are a huge number of variations of these questions that come up - or should come up - frequently while executing strategies. Instead, we often find that even some companies that do a great job of defining strategies do a poor job of executing them or tracking their health. The inability to connect the dots between strategies and all components of execution on one hand and between strategies and all stakeholders on the other significantly impacts our ability to make these strategies real.
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