When I probe clients for their IT strategy some respond by directing me to a dusty tome titled, "XYZ's 5-Year Strategic Information Technology Plan, 2011 - 2014." Some discuss the framework Image may be NSFW.
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used to make deliberate, long-term decision. Some offer roadmaps for cost reduction initiatives, or plans for delivering three new applications within, you guessed it, five years. And some clients reply "cloud" or "virtual" or "mobile-only."
Is IT strategy about deliberate decisions? Absolutely. Must the strategy be time-boxed to years? Not necessarily. In fact, in this age of disruptive technology, I'd argue the traditional "5-year" strategy plan is mostly a paper exercise to make us feel good, to make us feel in control. Is IT strategy about having a framework? Frameworks are vital to the strategy process but a framework is just a means to an end. Is cloud, or any other technology, an IT strategy? Being a VMware fan-boy, I'd like to answer yes but I have to admit cloud is just a model for delivering IT services, not a strategy onto itself.
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So how do you know if your strategy is effective? It's an important question because working backwards from this question allows you to identify, develop, and execute a strategy with intentional positive impacts. Much of what constitutes a working strategy is knowing the business and how best to meet its needs through IT. How ever IT meets the needs of business, you can be confident your strategy is working if you can consistently demonstrate some or all of the following capabilities:
- Reduced or contained IT spending[1,2] (while maintaining or improving upon status quo)
- Increased revenues
- Increased security
- Improved governance, risk, and compliance (GRC)
- Greater transparency into: (1) How IT works, (2) The benefits of IT services, (3) The true cost of IT service
- Faster delivery of new applications and updates to legacy applications
- Improvements to IT services in the form of: (1) Longer up-times, (2) Faster recovery and stronger continuity of operations, (3) Greater application performance and scale
- Aligned IT to Business: [3]
- Understanding what the business needs (accurately responding to business by delivering the right applications and services)
- Innovation - Proactively bringing solutions to the business that the business didn't know it needed
This would seem obvious to most but we tend to get caught up in technologies and day-to-day operational issues such that we never take time to examine and measure what benefits we are providing and how best to consistently provide those benefits. Along that line of thought, clients are pleasantly surprised when I don't lead with products during strategy discussions. In my opinion, virtualization and cloud are key technologies to having effective and efficient IT infrastructure, but IT strategy should start with seeking the benefits first. For example, how can a hybrid cloud solution reduce IT spend, and provide greater scalability and transparency? If I can faithfully answer those question, based upon the client's needs and constraints, then maybe we can have a conversation about vCloud and vCHS. Image may be NSFW.
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Today's CIOs live in exciting times! They've graduated from JV to Varsity: CIOs are now expected to be an all-star players for the team; to help the business "win." The flip-side of that expectation is that so much more is now demanded from IT, and competition (from within & outside) is fierce.
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[1] It's easy to lead with strategies focused on cost reductions but that low-hanging fruit doesn't leave a lasting impression. Most IT cost reductions are not strategic, meaning there is no consistent, sustainable financial impact. For instance, clients using storage de-duplication technologies experience minor, temporary, dips in their storage needs but usually not enough to satisfy the exponential growth in data inundating most organizations - welcome to the digital age. A better cost-reduction strategy might be to address data generation and demand. Do you really need to collect all the data you store today? Perhaps an enterprise "data grooming" initiative would help. Or, can you employ tiered-storage to implement (and automate!) permanent processes for archiving data based upon published and accepted criteria?
Another cost reduction example is server virtualization (VMs). Virtualization offers strategic cost-reductions but not in the way most people think. You absolutely save tons of money upfront (CapEx) through physical server consolidation. But, the real and strategic cost reductions are achieved on the operational side: fewer admins needed, lower energy costs, greater up-time, availability, flexibility, scalability, etc.
[2] However, I will say that all IT strategies should prove their value financially either through cost reductions or revenue generation. Even intangible benefits can be assigned monetary value. To do this well, you need formal IT business management in place using automation such as VMware's ITBM solution.
[3] Alignment is a great buzz word. It's the CIO's mantra now that more and more IT infrastructure is becoming a commodity. How do I, the CIO, become a partner with the business? By knowing more about the business than a low-cost transactional provider of IT. This is the real reason why IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) and IT Service Management (ITSM) is so important. The mindset of IT changes from providing technical assets to providing digital services which enable the business.