Industry-leading enterprises are committed to achieving compelling and
far-reaching goals. Many of them, however, have come to believe that their bold
aspirations cannot be realized without a critical mass of business units and individuals aligned and working effectively within a shared framework, which may mean the
difference between success and failure. That’s why BusinessMaker believes establishing an IT framework, such as ITIL, is a critical strategy.
At its core, an information technology strategy framework defines the essential elements of the IT department’s overall strategy and how those elements should interact and grow to produce continued value.
An IT strategy itself focuses on how IT will further the organization’s business goals. Its framework is a conceptual structure that guides the implementation of that strategy while also tying in any outside relationships and resources that need to be managed so the strategy can function at its fullest.
No two information technology strategy frameworks will ever be exactly the same. What works at one time for a specific set of goals may never work again once the parameters change. That’s why it’s very important for IT leaders to understand the value of creating a strong framework that works smoothly even as new technology and business priorities are introduced.
While a CIO will traditionally take ownership of creating the information technology strategy framework, you’ll learn in this article how important it is to include other resources both within and outside the IT department to ensure the final strategy can hold its own as a business-leading element across the entire company.
QUANTIFYING AND ALIGNING BUSINESS AND IT
That need to visualize IT’s effectiveness is exactly why you should focus on creating an information technology strategy framework.
The vast majority of decision makers in the business realm think in one acronym—ROI. And when it comes to IT, non-technical business leaders are either trying to get rid of IT investments with low or invisible ROI or turn up the value on those IT investments where they are seeing return.
Due to the nature of IT being a complex topic and having been relegated to performing only internal tasks in the near past, it can be really hard to understand how it’s moving the needle on business goals.
That’s why the information technology strategy frameworks we build today must have mechanisms that:
- Tie each initiative to a business objective
- Understand investment and ROI before pursuing an initiative
- Quantify benefits of the initiative, especially when they aren’t explicitly monetary
- Assess the impact of decisions before sinking a bunch of money into them
- Continuously monitor an initiative’s impact on alignment and value to enable course correction before it’s too late
An IT strategy framework that enables these checks and balances will help bring business and IT alignment to the forefront and result in benefits such as the following:
- Over 10 percent of IT investments don’t actually benefit business initiatives at all. Eliminating these outliers could easily eliminate 10 percent of your IT expenses.
- By fine-tuning IT investments per your new alignment mechanisms, you’ll be able to make initiatives more efficient and create a better ROI.
- With an alignment-focused IT strategy framework, you’ll have a guide for making better decisions when it comes to IT budgeting, application life cycles, enterprise-wide architecture planning, staffing, outsourcing, and more.
- An organized and laser-focused framework gives you deep visibility into the current state of business and IT alignment to identify where value is being lost, root causes of misalignment, and the impact that management decisions have on alignment and value over time.
