A key question to answer in our IT strategies is ‘where will we play?’ The answer to this question will be different for each organisation, failure to really answer this question is often where we might see copy&paste, cookie cutter ideas creeping into our strategies

Lafley and martin break down the component parts of the answer to the ‘where will we play?’ question into 5 key areas:

1. Geography

2. Customer

3. Channel

4. Offer

5. Stages of Production

Lets dig into each of them.

Geography

for our IT Strategy we can break Geography down further into these sub-categories

• The locations we serve

• Where our teams are located

• Where our infrastructure is located

Thinking about each of these areas can help inform the design of our strategy.

Customer

When considering our customers we can think about the following areas:

• The specific segments of customers of our organisation that we need to help serve

• The specific internal customers within our organisation that we need to enable

• Any new types of customer that we might need to think about within the lifespan of the strategy

Channel

When considering channels its useful to consider:

• Which channels do we need to support and improve for the customers of our organisation

• Which internal channels do we need to design and support to make it easy for our colleagues to do their jobs and serve our customers

• What technology, people, process, suppliers etc do we have in place to deliver effective service through those channels

Offer

What are our offers ( we could think of these in terms of services, or value propositions) that we need to provide for our (internal or external) customers

Stages of Production

• What is the total scope of the IT Strategy?

• of the capabilities within the scope of the IT Strategy what is the most effective approach to providing those capabilities (Wardley maps can be a useful tool to aid discussion around this)

• If there are areas where we use suppliers to deliver capabilities, it can be useful to think about the capabilities we need as an IT team to get the most value from those suppliers e.g. supplier management, procurement, contract management, etc.

Getting clear on the answer to the question of ‘where will we play?’, in the context of what our strategies winning aspiration is, is essential in order to ground our strategy in the reality of our organisation and strategic context