1) Focus

Creating and communicating a clear strategy that makes strong strategic decision can help provide focus for your teams and the teams you collaborate with. This focus comes as much from clearly stating what you will not focus on as it is from stating what you will focus on. A good IT Strategy is something to govern against to ensure your teams are working on the right things and saying “no” to the myriad of tactical and “can you just” tasks that do not move the IT Strategy (and therefore your business) forward

2) Investment

A good IT Strategy can be key to identifying the need for, and influencing the investment in capabilities to deliver the strategy. A good IT Strategy is an important keystone for unlocking investment, because it ties together:

• A clear definition of business need

• with the Strategic IT capabilities required to deliver those business needs

• to provide a compelling argument for investment (whether thats people/time/money)

3) Challenge

Developing a good IT Strategy does not involve just responding to the received wisdom and prevailing internal memes of the organisation you are in. A strong IT Strategy development process necessarily challenges the assumptions, prejudices and lazy thinking of your key stakeholders, or you simply aren’t doing your job properly. If you aren’t having uncomfortable conversations as part of your strategy development then you are skirting around the subjects and issues that you should be uncovering, illuminating and resolving. IT Strategy development is not a 1 way street, your IT Strategy development should absolutely challenge and inform and change your business strategy, or don’t just don’t bother, chuck a random selection of buzzwords together, get a consultant to copy and past some slides and just stop pretending you are really do IT Strategy.

4) Empowerment

Defining a clear IT Strategy enables delegation of decision making, because you have set the parameters for your team to work within, your IT colleagues have a clear direction to crack on and start delivering. A clear strategic direction removes the overhead and inherent risks of assumptions, guesswork and micro-management. A clear strategy gives your teams confidence to be empowered, to innovate and improvise with the clearly defined strategic structure.

Course, Newsletter and Podcast

In my upcoming How to IT Strategy course, we will go into more detail about how to ensure you create a great IT Strategy. Subscribe to this newsletter for more instalments and to be notified when the course launches