Strategic Information Technology Planning

How can your Information Technology group add value to the business if they don't know what the business is all about? If they don't deal with business issues regularly? If they don't build relationships with the business community? The answer is - They can't. All too often, the IT group is isolated from the business community and thus isolated from the ways they can truly add value to your company.

True IT value is about meeting the needs of their customers - usually business users in the company and sometimes the business' customers themselves. Talking 'geek', failing to meet schedules or other commitments, refusing to have empathy with user complaints are hallmarks of a failed IT organization.

We've found that one approach to resolving this dilemma is to increase the communication between IT and the business. Our approach is to help you create an Information Technology Plan - the blueprint for what IT needs to do to add value. This is a five-step approach that steeps the IT department in short-term and long-term business needs and develops a plan for meeting those needs.

We start with an assessment of the current state of affairs: infrastructure; people; perceptions. We then embark on a series of in-depth interviews of the business community by IT leaders. This starts the process of re-connecting IT with the business. In conjunction with these interviews, we review the factors that are driving technology and the factors that are driving the business. Using the result of these steps, we are then in a position to analyze where we are and where we need to go. Finally, our analysis leads us to an understanding of the desired future state, and what we need to do to get there.

The resulting Information Technology Plan is YOUR blueprint - one describing the direction that the IT group must take to increase their value to the business. After all , that's what IT is really all about - right?

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