How much analysis is enough for an IT Strategy?

If we fail to do sufficient analysis as part of our IT strategy development then we risk making naive, uninformed and potentially erroneous decisions, however at the other end of the scale, if we do too much analysis we delay action and risk analysis paralysis that maybe be more detrimental than uninformed actions. So how do we make sure we do ‘enough’ analysis, but not too much? How do we know how much is enough?

Personally i’ve been at either end of the scale at some point when creating IT strategies, the thing that i try and do to ensure i’m doing just enough analysis is by getting clarity and agreement on the key questions to answer for the strategy. This may take different forms. for example, if you are exploring strategic possibilities for our strategy then a great way of defining the scope of our analysis would be to answer the question “What would have to be true?” to identify the conditions for that possibility to be one that we should choose. We could then follow up that question by asking “which of these conditions might be barriers to achieving this strategic possibility?” which would further narrow down the analysis we need to do to answer that question.

Ultimately we also need to consider that there is a steep downward curve on the return on analysis over time. We can only draw so much insight form our analysis, before we need to start testing our strategic possibilities, and its often the case that once we get into testing we learn something ‘real’ that informs another iteration of analysis.

What about you, how do you think about the amount of analysis you need to do? let me know in the comments.