Learn about our IT strategy development framework with actionable steps, governance best practices, and measurement techniques to transform your organization’s technology approach.
In brief:
- A comprehensive IT strategy development framework aligns your technology investments with business objectives.
- Effective implementation requires an eight-to-10-week strategic planning process to overcome resistance, budget constraints, and integration challenges.
- To measure technology strategy success, you need to establish key performance indicators (KPIs), tracking systems, and methods for quantifying technical outcomes in business value terms, supported by strong governance and risk management frameworks.
- Change management built on trust is essential for successful IT transformation.
- Embed continuous improvement in your IT strategy framework.
Organizations require a comprehensive IT strategy development framework that connects technology decisions to long-term business goals rather than applying superficial, quick-fix methodologies that fail to deliver sustainable results.
When your enterprise technology strategy aligns with your business objectives, you transform your IT department from a cost center into a strategic enablement tool that reduces expenses, boosts efficiency, and optimizes operations.
An effective IT framework establishes a multiyear road map and addresses application efficiency, data management, infrastructure needs, disaster recovery, and budgetary discipline.
In this blog post, we’ll provide a step-by-step process for creating an IT strategy development framework that supports your organization’s growth trajectory and builds resilience against potential risks and opportunities.
What an Effective IT Strategy Looks Like
An enterprise IT strategy defines how your organization will use technology to support the business’s strategic goals and optimize operations. This ensures your IT investments directly contribute to your organization’s overall success.
An effective strategy involves the following IT-business alignment techniques:
- Establish a multiyear road map that supports your growth for years to come and takes into account potential risks and opportunities
- Incorporate the applications that can make your operations more efficient
- Consider how to store, manage, and protect valuable and sensitive data
- Include the physical and cloud infrastructure that will serve as the foundation of your IT system
- Factor in the specific benefits your IT will bring to operations
- Include disaster recovery and business resiliency tools and procedures
- Review vendor management, including cloud service providers
- Use budgetary constraints to guide your investments, both in terms of one-time purchases and subscriptions
- Consider staffing issues, which may involve reallocating some IT responsibilities
An important step in ensuring your IT strategy aligns with your business’s needs is performing a gap analysis to identify any technology or skills gaps, how those gaps affect operations, and how to fill them.
Once you’ve assessed your current landscape, it’s time to ensure that your strategic framework aligns with your business objectives.
Align Your IT Strategy With Business Objectives
Aligning your enterprise IT strategy development with your business objectives enhances your operational performance and ability to manage inevitable changes. As fractional chief information officer (CIO) Troy Gibson explains, change often requires strategic IT planning because change forces an organization to evolve, often sooner than they had planned.
An IT strategic plan addresses the issues that make the transition smoother, particularly ensuring IT supports the business’s goals.
Gibson says, “The question becomes what to do. So, the company focuses on things like technology, asset life cycle management, and changing technology landscapes. This also involves considering inefficiencies in IT spending, resource allocation, and how all of these things work together.”
CIO services expert Dickie Oliver also underscores the importance of managing your IT investments, especially given all the options in the current IT landscape.
“Businesses can sign up for any kind of cloud application, one for each business unit,” Oliver says. “Getting control of that while giving each unit the freedom of flexibility over what they want is important.”
Oliver says organizations have to take steps to avoid unexpected costs and unnecessary spending: “Businesses have to make sure they control their spending so they don’t end up with duplicate purchases or buy a cloud application that doesn’t truly support their operations.”
Step-by-Step Process for Developing an IT Strategy Framework
To develop your technology strategy best practices, follow this step-by-step process:
- Establish an eight-to-10-week strategic plan.
- Assess what you have and what needs to be kept, where you need to take your IT, and the investments and tools required to get there.
- Choose tools and frameworks that aid in IT strategy development. This may include service management frameworks or architecture frameworks like The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF).
- Consider emerging trends that impact your IT strategy, such as artificial intelligence (AI), using a distributed workforce, or cybersecurity concerns.
Once you’ve developed your strategy, it’s time to transform it from theoretical to actionable through a practical implementation system. To start, consider the challenges of implementing your new strategy.
Challenges of Implementing IT Strategies
This work doesn’t come without challenges. Below are a few of those challenges and steps to help you minimize them:
- Resistance to change. Use a phased approach that gives each IT change time to demonstrate its benefit before moving on to the next.
- Budget constraints. Meticulously plan your budget while considering worst-case, best-case, and most likely scenarios.
- Integration issues. Carefully choose tools that integrate well with your current systems. Data transformation and cleaning tools can also make it easier for systems to use integrated data.
- Cost justification. Budgetary and return on investment (ROI) planning is also key because, ultimately, the financial benefits of each initiative need to justify its costs. To assess the ROI of each project, you can quantify how it reduces the number of people-hours required to perform certain tasks, increases customer satisfaction and retention, or reduces the need for expensive hardware or maintenance spending.
Now that we’ve covered some of the challenges that come with implementing your IT strategy, let’s review some key components that will make your implementation a success.
Key Elements to Consider When Implementing Your IT Strategy
A practical implementation of your IT strategy involves turning your strategic planning into actual projects that your teams work on. To ensure your implementation is successful, focus on change management, measuring the IT strategy’s success, and governance and risk management.
Let’s explore each component in more depth.
Change Management
Change management is key to strategic IT planning. As Centric Consulting national people and change practice lead Hilary Lee points out, “Leadership and change management are indispensable to employees, who look to their leaders for stability, clarity and reassurance.”
The foundation of successful change management is trust. People and change expert Verna Montgomery says that establishing trust means you “consistently act with integrity, keep your promises, and can be counted on to do what is right, even if it’s not the easiest thing to do.”
Our approach to using trust to achieve successful change management involves combining compassion and expertise. For example, a multibillion-dollar healthcare insurance client we worked with needed to improve their IT maturity and modernize legacy systems. The company’s goals included reducing claim processing time and improving communication between their employees, partners and customers.
We first took the time to understand what the insurer needed in an implementation partner. We then connected the client with our Salesforce and Operational Excellence team. Instead of merely throwing a solution at the client, we used our experts to supplement their team. As we worked through business and technological issues, a relationship founded on trust began to emerge.
The result was a new platform that enables employees to focus on their most important work instead of time-consuming, cumbersome tasks. More importantly, Centric cemented a long-term relationship with the insurer by using trust as a foundational element of change management. We have served as the primary firm the CIO turns to for integration and implementation needs.
Once you’ve implemented your comprehensive technology strategies and gained control over change management, it’s time to measure the success of your efforts.
Measuring the Success of IT Strategies
Measuring the success of your IT strategy framework means you have to establish:
- Key performance metrics for each strategy’s success
- Methods for tracking and reporting on strategy performance, such as IT scorecards
- Ways of quantifying technical outcomes in terms of their business value — for instance, an automated, customer-facing ticket management system can reduce time to resolution, resulting in higher customer satisfaction scores
Continuous improvement is also key to an IT strategy framework because it fosters higher-quality results over time. Your continuous improvement system should incorporate:
- Periodic evaluations of strategy framework and program performance
- Feedback from a variety of stakeholders, including customers
- An expert to hold the team accountable for implementing feedback and process improvement suggestions so that ideas become tangible advancements
Governance and risk management are the glue that holds all this work together. They ensure you maintain control and reduce the chances of implementations hurting your bottom line.
Governance and Risk Management
Governance establishes how decisions get made, ethical guidelines, and the roles of everyone responsible for implementing your IT strategies. By establishing IT governance frameworks early on, you set up a dependable structure that team members can turn to when they have questions about operational procedures or when challenges arise.
Risk management in IT should involve identifying risks and mitigating them. Some common risks include:
- Outdated applications, which can hinder productivity and limit the number of integrations you can implement
- Data vacuums that make it impossible to make data-driven decisions
- Security vulnerabilities, often introduced by unsecure network connections, third-party vendors, or apps without adequate safeguards
Once you have your governance and risk management structures in place, you’re ready to turn your strategy development framework into winning solutions.
Use Your IT Strategy Development Framework to Build Robust Solutions
By applying the knowledge in this guide, you can start building a systematic, repeatable IT strategy development framework that simplifies and adds durability to your projects.
This process prioritizes strategic alignment and operational efficiency, ensuring that technology initiatives directly support your business goals. As you move forward, focus on strategic planning and set clear priorities that align with your digital transformation strategy.
Your next steps should be building your eight-to-10-week strategy and implementing your IT road map. Execute on your IT road map with precision by involving key stakeholders to ensure you effectively implement your strategy and achieve your strategic goals.
By following these guidelines, you will establish a technology investment plan that supports your growth strategy and adapts to emerging technologies, ultimately leading to a sustainable competitive advantage.
A robust enterprise architecture practice can help your organization reduce costs, optimize operations, and more. To fully realize these benefits, you need to assess your current state.
If you need help with any part of the information technology process, Centric has a knowledgeable team with deep skills and experience to help. Learn more about our CIO services. Contact us
