The Factors of “ABCDEFGH” for IT Strategy Management Success

Because technology is complex and the information is overloading. IT is perhaps one of the most sophisticated puzzle pieces in a modern company and it touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. 

With the fast pace of changes and exponential growth of information, there is a danger of not having a dynamic strategy management process to develop and nurture IT-enabled business potential. The best strategies are living and ever-evolving, and when deployed, it should provide the framework for the organization going forward.

Too often, business strategy and IT strategy are developed mutually exclusive to each other. In fact, the IT strategy should be the subcomponent of business strategy. A well-defined strategy will be successful when considering the multitude of “ABCDEFGH” factors.

AB = the Apparent Benefit (of the strategy): Information Technology strategy needs to be integrated into the organization's strategy that outlines how an enterprise can achieve important business goals such as innovation fluency, process efficiency, increased employee productivity, or customer delight. The apparent benefits of having a comprehensive enterprise-wide IT management strategy in place also include decision effectiveness, cost optimization, organizational fluidity, etc, by breaking down silos and enabling better information access and analysis.

To realize the benefits from strategy management, lubricate processes, and improve IT integration with the business by clarifying IT-enabled business competencies and operation layers as well as how they fit together. "Executive management buy-in,""executive management's unconditional collaboration" plus leadership and management discipline & practices, are all critical to improve strategic management success, as well as allow the organization to measure, serve, deliver, innovate, and ultimately excel in returns.

CD = the Current Discomfort (with the existing situation) Often IT failure is caused by the management of IT rather than just IT management. IT management needs to feel discomfort with the existing situation. In many companies with lower-level of maturity, the business is the sum of pieces, IT works only within the system, it often causes silo, stifles information flow, fails to translate the high-level language of strategy into the professional language of the various staff specialty and causes management pains.

In fact, the disconnect between the business and IT is still one of the biggest root causes to fail IT and business due to silo thinking, analysis paralysis, legacy technologies, lack of business/IT understanding, not leveraging the collective brainpower of strategic vendor partnerships, lack of in-depth understanding the business capabilities or resources, and lack of outside-in customer-centric approaches, etc. Effective strategy management can help to dig into the root causes and improve IT organizational maturity.

EF = the Effort Forecast (to realize the strategy) We live in an era full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. Predict and deal with threats or disruptions that IT faces, sometimes you need to be able to look for something “hidden,” which is not always so obvious, in order to make better assumptions or improve forecast precision. Have a very good grasp of the overall business, its strategy, the marketplace, business model, and competitive distinctiveness to ensure that the IT-enabled solutions supplied to the enterprise deliver maximum value at an acceptable cost. IT has to provide both business and technical insight into how they bring success to the company as a whole transparently, holistically, and continually.

Predict what will happen and step further, and what you should do upon it. Forecast the IT effort to realize the strategy, prediction can be an outcome of the controllable relationships within a system and skillfully apply risk-based thinking to almost every discipline of IT management, including people management, financial management, asset management, reputation management, customer relationship management, organizational structure design, product or service development and so on.

GH = General Hassle (going on at the time and interfering with priorities) The organization has a limited budget and finite resources to apply to get the best yield possible to meet stakeholders’ expectations. IT leaders need to gain a clear understanding of what the priorities need to be. The right answer about the highest strategic priority depends on which of the business areas are most in need of improvement in the organization. There are always some constraints for IT organizations to balance a healthy portfolio of “running, growing, and transforming.”

Often, lack of the strategic focus or a clear understanding of what the priority needs to be is a general hassle to effective IT strategy management. There is no way to create a definitive prioritized list without a business context. There're a lot of things CIOs may already be familiar with, such as enterprise architecture, the latest technology trend, etc, and CIOs need to set project priority, weave the clear picture of business by crafting IT capabilities and competitive differentiators to ensure business for long-term perspectives and seamless strategy management.

Because technology is complex and the information is overloading. IT is perhaps one of the most sophisticated puzzle pieces in a modern company and it touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. IT management needs to understand the multitude of “ABCDEF” factors to improve IT strategy management effectiveness by expanding its impact in every dimension to improve the company’s operational excellence, business responsiveness, performance, flexibility, digital fluency, and maturity.

Posted in: IT Strategy/Roadmap,IT Transformation,Strategy