An IT strategy framework defines the components of your organization’s IT strategy.
In today’s business landscape, technology serves as an instrument for success.
No matter what industry you operate in or who your target audience is, IT is an essential component of any organization.
You need a solid IT strategy to leverage technology to achieve business objectives fully.
IT executives and business leaders can use the IT strategy to navigate the complex technology landscape and make decisions that ultimately drive growth and increase revenue.
However, creating an IT strategy requires deliberation, research, and consultation.
This article provides tips to help you write a practical yet agile IT strategy framework that clearly defines objectives, stakeholders, timelines, and metrics for measuring performance.
What Is an IT Strategy Framework?
An IT strategy framework takes a structured approach to planning, developing, and managing IT initiatives and projects.
It essentially provides the technical and logical foundation of the IT strategy, creating a roadmap for IT projects that may require different technologies and expertise.
It’s a document that contains a vision, mission, goals, plans, and measures about all things IT.
For instance, it could incorporate a company’s mission to go completely digital. Similarly, it could outline measures to enhance cybersecurity.
While an IT strategy may direct IT operations, it impacts every department in a company. Therefore, creating a strategy for IT typically involves all key stakeholders in the business, even if their role isn’t directly related to the IT department or team.
In short, an IT strategy framework defines the goals and methods to achieve them through various technologies.
Benefits of a Sound IT Strategy
According to Gartner, global IT spending is projected to cross $4.7 trillion in 2023.
Businesses are willing to spend top dollar to expand their IT footprint, adopt new technologies, and enhance the expertise onboard. However, pouring money into IT resources without a strategy can result in less-than-desirable outcomes.
Here’s why a robust IT strategy is so important:
- Realizing Business Goals: Any IT initiative should help achieve the company’s business goals. Technology can enable the business to realize its vision and achieve its short and long-term objectives.
- Competitiveness: There are countless accounts of failed organizations due to the slow adoption of new technologies. An IT strategy can ensure you’re competitive in the market, prioritizing efforts that help you keep up with the industry trends.
- Cost Control: Without a plan, going over your IT budget is easy. With a comprehensive strategy framework considering budget allocations, you can prioritize projects and resources that provide the most value. It also helps keep costs in check at every step and provides room for adjustments when necessary.
- Compliance: Enterprises worldwide are facing increasingly strict data protection and privacy regulations. Non-compliance can result in hefty fines, not to mention reputational damage that can take years to fix. Compliance can be made an essential aspect of IT strategy, ensuring that all collection and usage of data comply with applicable regulations.
- Innovation: An IT strategy can foster innovation through digital transformation, adoption of emerging technologies, and collaboration. With an agile strategy that empowers minds, designers, developers, and engineers can come together to brainstorm and implement creative solutions for the organization’s problems.
- Scalability and Adaptability: An agile IT strategy framework enables scalability and adaptability to meet changing business needs or market demands. Growth can be managed much more effectively with a strategy to scale IT resources as and when necessary.
10 Tips for Creating an IT Strategy Framework
An IT strategy is like project management, whereas the framework is the project plan.
It should be a detailed document that should go through several reviews from different stakeholders before being finalized and adopted.
Here are some tips to help you devise and craft a solid IT strategy framework:
Align Business Objectives
The first thing to do is to revisit the organization’s business objectives. You may consult materials like business plans, mission/vision statements, and financial projections.
The very purpose of the IT strategy is to use technology to help the organization achieve its objectives.
Therefore, aligning the IT strategy's goals with the company's overall business goals makes sense.
The business goals essentially guide the methods in the strategy, linking technological resources with desired outcomes.
For instance, a company’s goal is to increase customer engagement and increase loyalty toward their brand. This goal can be realized with a reliable customer relationship management (CRM) solution that personalizes the customer experience.
Engage Stakeholders
In medium to large organizations, involving all stakeholders during any strategizing phase is essential.
Before creating the IT strategy, it can be insightful to consult with stakeholders from different departments and levels.
While the IT team may oversee networks, devices, and tools, all users interact with technology in one way or another.
So, it’s essential to consider their opinion and feedback so their pain points concerning technology can be addressed in the strategy.
Doing so also opens the floor for input from diverse sources, which can help you discover opportunities.
Assess Current State (SWOT Analysis)
It’s also essential for organizations to assess the current infrastructure, such as equipment and software.
Similarly, you should also assess capabilities both in terms of technical and human resources.
A strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis of your current tech infrastructure and expertise can reveal shortcomings that may hamper productivity and growth.
At the same time, you can identify resources that can work to your advantage and enable your business to reach objectives.
Besides identifying the technology in use, analyze how it’s being used and how it can be optimized.
Research Industry Trends
Once you’ve identified the gaps in your technical capabilities, you can see how others are solving such issues.
More importantly, informing yourself on emerging technologies and their projected impact can help you include and prioritize those that may maximize yield for your operations.
Many reputable and trusted consultancy and research firms forecast new technologies' adoption, market value, and value generation.
Read reports on emerging technologies and see how they can advance your strategic goals.
More importantly, identify which technologies your direct competitors adopt to further their goals.
Clearly Define Requirements and Scope
Once you’ve analyzed your business goals, the state of your infrastructure and resources, and upcoming technologies, you can define the requirements for your organization’s technology systems and the scope of any initiatives.
Define the requirements in detail, including the role of different stakeholders.
This may include several things, including but not limited to hardware procurement, software licensing, and data architecture.
Correlate the use of each technology with the underlying business goal so it’s clear what you’re trying to achieve.
Identify and Define Risks and Corresponding Mitigation Plans
Besides defining what you want to achieve, assessing what you need to avoid is equally important.
Your IT strategy should address potential threats, including cybersecurity concerns and how you plan to address them.
A strategy that doesn’t account for risk isn’t comprehensive enough. And the last thing you need is to get caught off guard.
Risks may not solely be related to cybersecurity, as you may also be dealing with potential loss of productivity or lack of expertise.
For instance, if you plan to install new equipment but lack the hardware engineering expertise onboard, you’ll need to define a plan to bridge the skill gap. The solution may involve hiring a dedicated engineer or outsourcing installation, configuration, and maintenance to a third party.
Define KPIs
If you can’t measure the impact of your efforts and initiatives, you can’t be sure of their success.
That’s why you must define metrics for measuring the performance of your systems.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) may vary based on your IT systems and circumstances.
For example, common KPIs for data centers include availability of resources, power usage effectiveness, peak load, and hot spot frequency and duration.
The metrics shouldn’t solely be systems-related; they should also cover business and operational performance.
For instance, return on investment (ROI) on hardware or software purchases can tell you how much value such solutions bring to your operations.
KPIs should be well-defined in your IT strategy, allowing admins, managers, and executives to track the progress of all projects and make changes where necessary.
Allocate Resources
You can maximize efficiency and productivity with strategic use of the resources you have at your disposal.
Your IT team is your most crucial asset, followed by your tech stack. Utilizing each team member's skillset optimally will allow you to get more done fast.
You may not always have the resources available for every operation or service.
Those gaps in resources and expertise can be filled via managed IT services.
From the helpdesk for ticketing to securing the entire network, third-party services are available for various essential IT tasks.
Create a Roadmap
A good IT strategy doesn’t just outline objectives but also draws a roadmap with a timeline of various milestones.
You should have a clear schedule of major and minor milestones for short and long terms.
A roadmap will help you prioritize and complete critical projects in time.
Any deadlines you set for milestones should be realistic. Rushing to complete implementation can lead to issues like poor configuration or integration with existing systems.
Standardize Practices and Procedures
Lastly, define the methods for standardizing procedures in your IT strategy framework.
You can adopt existing industry standards or create your own from scratch.
Creating standards makes it easier for IT teams and other users across the organization to follow specific directions and get things done how they’re supposed to.
Following standards can also help with security. More often than not, cyber-attacks and subsequent data loss result from human errors.
Having stringent security standards will ensure users abide by the rules and don’t create vulnerabilities for attackers to exploit.
FAQs
What are the 3 key components of a strategic IT plan?
While an IT strategy plan has many components, the most important three are alignment with business objectives, IT goals and requirements, and metrics to measure performance.
With these three components in your IT strategy, you can streamline IT operations to achieve business goals.
What is a 5-year IT strategy plan?
A 5-year IT strategy is a detailed document that provides a roadmap for an organization's IT operations and projects for the next five years.
It outlines both near-term and long-term objectives of the company.
It may include projects that can take multiple years to complete, for example, digitization of records.
What kind of IT strategies are there?
An IT strategy framework covers all technology use and management aspects, including cost, vendor, human resources, digital assets, and risk management.
However, IT strategies can also be designed for specific purposes. The different types of strategies include:
- Cost Control: A strategy to reduce IT operational expenses (OpEx).
- Defensive: A strategy to minimize risks and protect assets from security threats.
- Innovation: A strategy to design and produce new products or services.
- Digital Transformation: A strategy to adopt digital systems.