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Strategy

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Click on the grey buttons above to open an overlay menu that shows the areas in each major section.
Click on the yellow buttons to the right to move between pages in this area.

DEVELOPING AN IT STRATEGY
What is a strategy? Lots of different definitons exist, most of them identify a strategy as a plan to
achieve goals or to bring about a desired future. Others talk of the 'art of planning and marshalling
resources' and yet other combine these, talking of 'Setting goals, determining what actions are
needed to achieve these goals and then organising resources to perform the actions'.
I like Max McKeown's definition, 'Strategy is about shaping the future' (I also like another quote of his,
'change is inevitable but progress is not')
For me, a strategy is about setting or defining strategic goals and a strategic plan is about defining
how to achieve those goals.

It is often difficult to know where to start with writing an IT strategy, especially if your is a large
company with several sites and offices. A quick Google search will bring up hundreds of ways to
develop and structure a plan, so here is another one! This one should be easy to follow, and
reasonably easy to implement. At its simplest, a strategy answers three questions.
Where do we want to be?
Where are we starting from?
How do we get there?
However I'd like to stress from the start that a Strategy Plan is not something that you write up, get
signed off then file away. It is a document that will be used to direct and shape your IT organisation
over a period of time and as such it is a dynamic document, it will need to be changed as
circumstances change. Also, you cannot develop an IT strategy in isolation, you need to know your
company’s overall strategic plan so that you make sure the plans align.

Beginning your Strategy Project

The first essential is to get buyin from your management team, and also to find out what they are
expecting fron an IT strategy. You might not deliver all their requirements, but you should be able to
explain why your deliverables might not match their expectations.
The second essential is to put a planning team together. These people will usually be the experts in
their own fields, but not necessarily experts in strategy planning. It is therefore essential to establish a
team leader, and ensure that they have the clout and backing from management to keep the team on
track. The team leader should not be a dictator type, they must be willing to listen to and draw out
ideas from the team members. However the leader must be someone who can impose some structure
and discipline on team meetings, otherwise they will just dissolve into a talking shop. Sometimes it is
worth paying for an external team leader or consultant to cut through the politics.

How many years ahead should you plan for? I used to write 5-Year plans, but given the rate of
change in the world today, I think that is too long now. I'd suggest a 3-year plan, with the provisio that
changes will happen in even that timescale which could mean that your plan has to be revised.

So now you have your management buy-in, your strategy team, and a leader to guide the process
through. Now all you need to do is follow these 9 steps.
 1. Ask yourselves, where are you now?
2. State your vision, where do you want to get to
3. Which especial areas do you need to focus on?
4. Take this general vision and focus areas and distil them down to a number of specific
objectives
5. Produce a high-level design or execution plan of the projects that you will need to deliver
those objectives
6. Determine some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you will use to measure how well the
individual projects are delivering to the plan
7. Write this up as a Strategic Plan
8. Present it to Management for approval
9. Deliver

Easy? Well we will need to flesh these 9 items out a bit, but basically that is all there is to it.

Where Are We Now?

There is a tale that a tourist in Ireland stopped and asked a local; "Can you tell me how to get to
Kilarney?" The local chap replied "To be sure, if I was going to Kilarney I would not be starting from
here." The point is that you cannot plan a route from point A to point B without knowing where you are
starting from, and it might not be practical or possible to get to your vision, if your starting point is too
far away. So for example, if your main focus is to successfully merge two companies, we would need
to list out what each company does, how they work, who the people are and how effective they are.
This, of course, is not a simple task, especially if the companies are large. A SWOT analysis might
help here.
Depending on exaclty what goal you are trying to deliver, you might also want to take a look at what
other IT shops are doing, and how effective they are. You should also do a technology analysis, to
find out what is out there, and what might be on the horizon. This lot sounds like a lot of work, but it is
essential to build a good foundation for your plan.

Where do you want to be?

This section is often called the Vision Statement and it will very much depend on the brief that you
were given by Management. Now you know where you are starting from, you can make a sensible
decision on where you would like to go to. In my experience, IT strategies are often about cost
reduction, or cost containment, doing more with less, or absorbing an increased worklod into existing
resources. You may be introducing new technology, new ways of working, integrating two
organisations after a takeover or merger, but at this stage, the Vision is high level, not specific. To
give a simple example, our vision might be "We will merge company A with company B, taking the
best practices from each, so we result in a stronger company when we are finished. " Nothing specific
in there, that comes later.

Focus Areas

If you start looking around at different types of strategy, you will quickly see that there is no consensus
on what all the different terms mean, and these next items are especially confusing. Different experts
talks about Focus areas, Goals and Objectives and mean the same things, others mix up Objectives
with KPIs. To avoid any confusion, I'm going to miss Goals altogether and define the other as:

 Focus Areas - where will we concentrate our resources for change

 Objectives - what changes do we wish to make to these focus areas?
 KPI - how will we measure success or failures?

Focus Areas form the basis of your strategic plan. They are critical to define your priorities and
initiatives and to clarify what your plan will accomplish. Focus Areas are useful to, well, focus you and
your team down specific routes, rather than wandering off in randon directions. Focus Areas expand a
bit on the Vision, but again they are not too specific or time bound.
To use the company merger illustration, the Focus Areas might be:

 Create a new organisation model for IT

 Select the best working practices for the new IT teams
 Consolidate the Hardware estate
 Consolidate the Software estate
 Consolidate the Desktop estate

(I'm assuming here that selection and consolidation of applications will be a business decision and
driven by business strategies.)

Focus Areas should be both precise and concise as above and the expected outcome should be
stated. You don't need too much detail here, that comes next with the Objectives.

Objectives

Objectives are used to tie the strategy down and detail exactly what it is you want to achieve and
when. You should have one or more objectives for every focus area you listed. If you cannot come up
with objectives for a focus area, then that focus is wrong and needs to be revised or removed.
Objectives are action items with start and end dates. They should be quantifiable and measurable
with no ambiguity about whether you achieve them or not. SMART is a tired old acronym, but it is
good for writing objectives: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic/Relevant, and Time-bound.

For example, an objective for the second Focus Area above might be:

Define a metric that can identify which working practices are most effective - end July

Programme of work

A strategy is useless unless someone implements it. Without a Programme of Projects, a strategy will
never be more then a few powerpoint slides and a word document, filed away and forgotten. To make
things happen, you need a plan, and people who are responsible for implementing that plan. So, while
you do not need or want to write out a detailed set of implementation projects, what you do need is a
list of projects, each of which will implement one or more of your objectives, will have a responsible
person, and a delivery date. If you have a project office, It could be a good idea to get them involved
in, or at least aware of this plan.
Your programme plan should include approximate costs, and also people. Do you have enough
(suitable) people to implement the plan. Do you need to hire temporary staff to fill in for any shortfall?
This plan basically lists out who is going to do what, when, and how.

Key Performance Indicators

How will you know if your programme of work is running to schedule and implementing your
objectives as expected? Define a set of KPIs that you can use to measure how well the programme of
work is going, and whether or not it is meeting your strategy objectives. Just make sure that all your
KPIs are specifically linked to your objectives. KPIs can be a mixture of financial and nonfinancial
measures, but they must be quantifiable. A part of you KPI definition, state how often each KPI will be
measured and reported, state how will you get the measurement data, and who will collect it.

Say your 'where are we now' investigation noted a weakness in resolving customer incidents and
problems. A suitable KPI, linked to the 'Select best working practices' objective might be;

"85% of customer queries and incidents resolved within 24 hours. Target to be achieved within first
year. Problem Management team to extract data from problem recording database and report
progress weekly. "
 Writing the Strategic Plan

You have done most of the work for this already, but now you need to pull it all together in a
document.

Start with a clear, concise summary page that explains what this strategy is about, and what it is
expected to deliver. This is sometimes called a management or executive summary, but I've heard
managers take exception to this, as it implies that they are too thick to understand the detail! So just
call it a summary. What you want to do is tickle the reader’s interest and so get them to read the rest
of the plan.
Next, summarise the data you discovered in your 'where are we now' item. You will most likely have
far too much data to incluide here, but it might be a good idea to add the detail as an appendix at the
end, for those who wish to read it. Most people, of course, will just want to read the stuff about their
own team. Make sure you explain how your IT strategy will dovetail into your company strategy.

Now list out all the detail that you defined above, your
Vision
Focus areas
Objectives
Programme plan
KPIs.

Add appedices as appropriate, for example, a SWOT analysis for each IT team, technology review
and potential directions and experiences from other sites.
If you are looking for formal acceptance of your plan, then you will need a signoff page for senior
management to show their approval.

Communicate your plan

Once you complete your plan, it is essential to get it out there so people can read it. Start with a
presentation to management. This one is critical, as you will expect it to result in approval to
implement your plan. Pick a good experienced presenter who can put the plan over in a confident
manner. If you bought in the services of an expert, then they should fit the bill. However you need a
representational sample of your team too, as you will certainly get questions, and you need the right
people there to answer them.
You will probably need to make a few modifications to your plan before you get it approved, but
hopefully you will get it finalised and signed off.

Now you need to present it to your various teams, so they can buy in to the ideas and make it work. It
is inevitable that some people will be resistant to change, but by explaining the overall vision, and
then how each person fits into fullfilling that vision, you will hopefully carry the majority with you.

Delivery

Now comes the hard part, you need to deliver the plan and make it all happen. This may well be your
responsibility in a small organisation, while in a larger one you will pass this onto your programme
office. However even if you are not directly involved in implementation, you need to keep an eye on
progress and make sure that any deviation is necessary and agreed.

Good Luck!

New Technology

 Quantum Storage
 DNA storage
  Holographic storage
 Millipede Storage

Storage Strategy

 Writing a Storage Strategy

 How to Write an IT Strategy
 Storage Purchasing

Lascon updTES

I retired 2 years ago, and so I'm out of touch with the latest in the data storage world. The Lascon site
has not been updated since July 2021, and probably will not get updated very much again. The site
hosting is paid up until early 2023 when it will almost certainly disappear.
Lascon Storage was conceived in 2000, and technology has changed massively over those 22 years.
It's been fun, but I guess it's time to call it a day. Thanks to all my readers in that time. I hope you
managed to find something useful in there.
All the best

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