Submit your e-mail address below. You will respond to three separate prompts but prepare your paper as one research paper. The IT strategic plan should outline a mission statement that states what it plans to achieve and how the IT strategy relates to the organization's overall business objectives. IT leaders in consumer-focused businesses, for example, will want to make changes more frequently. Understanding the project's focus and scope is important in determining the types of data you need to collect to support it. For IT veteran Laura Smith, CIO of UnityPoint Health, the IT strategic plan for the 30,000-employee healthcare system is focused on helping the organization make the shift to being reimbursed based on quality rather than service volume. IT strategic planning must be firmly rooted in the business strategic plan — period. Also, what does this mean for resources and the types of people IT must deal with if issues occur? IT’s role in the development and execution of business strategy has grown significantly in the era of digital transformation. Surveys can be augmented with user testimonials (good and bad) and other qualitative and descriptive performance data. Statistics and charts that bring in related data (such as the cost of a graduate research assistant) provide significant value. As a result, her plan includes a roadmap to maximize reimbursement, transforming the culture of the IT department to support the organization more effectively, and engaging customers and other stakeholders more directly in large-scale technological change. A strategic plan is a framework for describing the organization's key processes, people, and technologies at a specific time in the future (typically 3–5 years) and how the organization can reach that future, given its current processes, people, and technologies. Gartner advises creating a “clear and achievable” process for developing the strategic plan, using any existing or previously used plan as a starting point. IT Strategy creates IT Capability. Will changes in teaching pedagogy (such as the flipped classroom) significantly affect the IT support infrastructure for faculty and students? determine key issues and questions arising from that focus (task 2). To ensure that the plan serves its purpose, the institution — as embodied in its strategic planning team — must fully understand its current state, as well as the factors that will impact and drive it into the desired future state. Strategic planning projects require significant upfront investment — including for gathering materials, developing agendas, and surveying the community — to support project participants in their efforts. Figure 1 shows the major components of the strategic planning process. Prior to assessing which data should be collected, the strategic planning committee should. “I am a big believer in fast and mostly right versus slow and perfect,” says Bedi. No problem! Although high-quality data don't always lead to high-quality decisions, poor-quality data often lead to poor decisions. Sign up for free EDUCAUSE Review weekly emails to hear about new content. In between are planning projects that revisit an existing strategic plan because something significant has changed; examples include a major shift in educational policy, such as focusing on online education for remote students or a shift from in-house to cloud computing. “The plan is about understanding where to make investments and what capabilities the company will need — the people, partners, processes, and systems required — to do that,” says Fenwick. “While the financials are still important, the starting point needs to be the business strategy,” says Strock of Paypal. It can also include an investment portfolio roadmap, timeframes, goals, and a discussion of risks and other issues. IT strategy (information technology strategy) is a comprehensive plan that outlines how technology should be used to meet IT and business goals. “The biggest challenge for IT leadership is whether or not the CIO feels comfortable with business strategy and can lead and shape discussion around that,” says Nigel Fenwick, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. For example, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was being planned, physicists designed their distributed computing environment in anticipation of computer networking capability levels of multiple gigabits per second, which no university had yet implemented. “If one is going to articulate a statement of purpose, try to make it one that inspires action or provides needed clarity.”, Most IT organizations will create a full IT strategic plan at least once a year, but the fast-changing business environment demands that most update their approaches more frequently. The plan outlines areas where IT can contribute business value and where an organization can gain competitive advantage by making the best use of technology resources. doesn't provide much basis for discussing the issues. Which data are needed to make that discussion most productive? The following example shows how these data types can raise issues for discussion. The strategic planning resource staff must collect a wide variety of data and make those data available to the strategic planning committee to support each component of the strategic planning process (see figure 1). On the technology front, data must show the technologies currently available, as well as what can reasonably be expected in the future. While IT strategic planning is important, spending too much time to develop it can also be dangerous. “I think measurement along the way is critical to ensure one is tracking to plan and can course correct, if needed.”, Many IT leaders will include a set of guiding principles or other explanations that guide IT’s decision making. Privacy Policy CIOs must be intimately involved in the creation of those documents and other artifacts that provide direction about what the enterprise needs to do, why it needs to do it, and how it will accomplish that. Experts and CIOs agree that effective IT strategy begins with an IT-informed business strategy. This article provides such a framework. ), The data's source, including primary (collected for the current study), secondary (previously collected), and external (public databases). “One can always iterate and fill a specific gap.”, The best IT strategic plans include measures of success that will serve as mile markers for progress over time. This process will also help analyze the gap between where the IT department currently is in achieving its goals and what it wants to achieve. Data characteristics to consider include: You can create a spreadsheet with data items as rows and these characteristics as columns to classify each; you can then look for "holes" in your data and decide whether you need to find data with other combinations of characteristics. Data quality should be thoroughly addressed, particularly when the person or group collecting those data has a vested interest in the decisions that may be made using them. (Yesterday's high-performance computers are hardly comparable to today's.) The plan also helps guide an organization as it formulates its overall IT strategy. Data must be collected and developed to highlight trends, raise strategic issues (including resource concerns), and distinguish the needs of different community stakeholders (such as students, faculty, administration, and alumni). The list of such questions goes on, and a full data definition should answer all such questions — before they are asked. Copyright © 2017 IDG Communications, Inc. The SWOT analysis also helps to identify any of the company's technological assets that might be an unknown competitive advantage and that the organization should consider investing. In deciding the type and level of analysis to perform, consider how data will be used (either in describing the current state, analyzing issues, or determining the future state or action). Learning and Teaching 2. The best IT plan is no longer simply a rundown of the financial investment required or a list of technologies to implement. Imagine the difficulty in (and importance of) defining data elements about faculty needs for high-performance computing: How do you define need? But CIOs should avoid tired or trite explanations. Gartner advocates swift and focused strategic plan development in order to prevent loss of focus, scope creep, or diminished currency and relevance. Data showing the current and expected increase in network bandwidth (and the reduction in costs) allowed physicists to work with university IT departments to ensure that LHC expectations could be met, offering an example of effective data-driven IT strategic planning. Also, adding metrics such as the relative research intensity of the institutions should make the data even more useful and thus of higher quality for decision makers.

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