IT should always stay focused on the big picture of the business, leverage and prioritize, to do the strategic planning right, and keep track of the value-added delivery that make the organization competitive.
With continuous disruptions and fierce competitions, many IT organizations suffer from overloaded tasks and overwhelming growth of information. They encounter so many daily distractions that stop them from laser focusing on achieving strategic business goals. High performance CIOs should have knowledge and leadership influence to demonstrate IT as strategic business competency. They need to build a good strategy which is an integral component of the business strategy, based on the circumstances that will allow the highest probability of IT management success. But more specifically: How to make IT strategic planning right?
A good strategy includes consideration of competitive forces in the business and the marketplace: Information Technology is permeating into every corner of the organization. Nowadays IT can contribute significantly and directly to the business model and strategic direction of the company. To effectively respond to the digital dynamics, CIOs must begin thinking about ways with IT strategic planning to broaden their ecosystem view and consider competitive forces in the business and the marketplace. Some organizations create a sense of internal competition that can easily make the C-level participants lose sight of the end game, To do an effective strategic planning, you need to understand your competition, also have to build up the strong partnership with executive peers, business managers, and other service providers, pull up the resources and partners to build up new business differentiators. Strategic IT leaders can manage a mixed bag of diversified vendors, multifaceted partnerships, co-ownership of ventures within the digital ecosystem to build a strategic IT for driving business growth and innovation.
A good strategy articulates the differentiated competencies you should build for gaining the long-term business advantage: The capability-based strategy has much higher opportunities to be implemented successfully. Thus, a good strategy should describe a set of competencies, help the top business executives understand what are key elements (such as emerging digital technologies, resources, processes, and human capitals, etc) of the business capability to drive the future business growth; and then, take a multidimensional approach to do the business strategy and capability mapping. You build the best strategy based on the circumstances that will allow the highest probability of management success and risk controlling. With dynamic marketing conditions, companies today need to learn how to build dynamic business capabilities which are defined as the business’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external factors to address rapidly changing environments, build up new capabilities, and achieve innovative forms of competitive advantage given path dependencies and market positions. With effective IT strategic planning, IT executives move beyond commodity management and begin to show higher level strategic value and dedicate more resources on building dynamic business competencies systematically.
A good strategy also sets clear guidelines and lists a set of strategic options to help the organization take wise moves: Good strategic planning deals with horizontal scanning environment, sets important guidelines, and helps the organization make strategic choices consistently. For example, differentiation is one of the many strategic options IT can make, but you have to plan it right and make it a true value differentiator from a different perspective. IT feels more comfortable to involve customers and different stakeholders, listen to their feedback, gain fresh insight, and take different propositions and approaches to solve either existing or emerging problems creatively. In fact, the digital IT trajectory to make strategic difference is to become a revenue generator and choice maker for driving business growth and delighting customers. To put simply, differentiation is not the end game, value creation and forward vision are.
Strategic CIOs are proactive, energetic, highly engaged, seek to engage others; they can communicate effectively with all levels of the organization, and they should always stay focused on the big picture of the business, leverage and prioritize, to do the strategic planning right, and keep track of the value-added delivery that make the organization competitive. IT is becoming the strategic competency of the company.
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