IT is a core part of our business and closely aligned with the strategy. How do we communicate that alignment and demonstrate it to our colleagues and stakeholders?
This starts with our business strategy, every business has one, even if sometimes it can feel hard to find. The business strategy should drive every division and department’s strategy. IT is no exception. Communicating the division’s strategy reinforces the business strategy to our colleagues and shows the alignment of the division to that strategy.
At its simplest we can consider a business strategy to be four perspectives:
- Financial or Stakeholder Perspective: Generally the money in the bank and the forecast for future revenue. How that revenue is being achieve and grown over time
- Customer Perspective: The segmentation of the customers into groupings and how their behaviour is changing over time.
- Operational Perspective: Performance of product lines and divisions. Also the social impact and environmental agendas.
- People Perspective: Employee engagement in the business and development or expansion of the employee base.
Each of these perspectives will drive a narrative of evolution for the IT division. Let’s consider a few examples.
Financial or Stakeholder Perspective
Revenue forecast may be implying a growth to the business. This could be a 10% year or year growth. That is additional transactions and activities for our IT services. These forecasts will underpin IT’s capacity forecasts and link into the budget for expansion of infrastructure, licences and services.
We may also see cost challenges in this perspective and a need to tighten belts. This might be reflected in a slow infrastructure renewal programme in the IT division. Other discretionary projects may also pause to control costs.
Customer Perspective
Customer behaviour changes may represent a change of focus within IT on where the majority of effort and money is being spent. The increase in online shopping during the pandemic has certainly driven retailers to move investment into single picking and last mile distribution capabilities.
Customer behaviours may also stimulate innovation and experimentation on new services for customers, and the associated IT capabilities to deliver these.
Operational Perspective
In business operating different customer propositions through different divisions the performance of these divisions may drive similar narratives to the stakeholder and customer perspectives but at the divisional level.
“Gartner Predicts Hyperscalers’ Carbon Emissions Will Drive Cloud Purchase Decisions by 2025”
The social and environmental impact is something the IT team will have a part in. Gartner has predicted that Carbon Emissions will drive purchase decisions on Cloud Vendors by 2025. We have only just got over looking at the carbon impact of our in house data centres but now will look at the services we buy in too. Linking this back into the corporate agenda for social concerns.
People Perspective
Traditionally we count employees and forecast headcount growth. Additional people means more desktop equipment and help desks calls for IT. It may also mean more office space or expansion of the hybrid working models.
More companies focus the people’s perspective on engagement levels. How employees drive the business forward and develop themselves. A win/win scenario rather than transactional purchased labour. An engaged workforce is a learning workforce with multi-channel communications.
The business expansion, changes of focus, environmental impact and new services to support the employees all represent a narrative for IT. One that shows IT to be closely aligned to the business for stakeholders and our colleagues. A narrative that is so much more than just putting laptops on desks.
If you are interested in IT Strategy take a look at my course on Udemy which talks about this in much more detail.
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