“Strategy” gets dropped into lots of conversations in IT teams, often meaning very different things. This guide pulls together what I have learned about writing the IT strategy: the one that shows how IT supports the business, motivates the IT team, and gets its plan funded.

1. Be clear what you mean by strategy

A useful starting definition is “a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim”. In IT, long term probably means 18 months to three years. Henry Mintzberg goes further, with four meanings of strategy, and you will hear all of them in an IT team:

• Strategy as a plan: “What is our strategy for BYOD adoption?”
• Strategy as a pattern over time: “What is our environment strategy for SAP HANA?”, which may only exist as tribal knowledge
• Strategy as a position or decision: “We shouldn’t use Java, it isn’t strategic”
• Strategy as perspective, a vision and direction: “How will the change in business strategy affect IT?”

That last one is THE IT strategy. I think it should cover three dimensions:

• IT service: how the service IT provides will evolve.
• IT capabilities: the tools and applications the changing business will need, captured in the IT roadmap.
• IT plan and cost: how IT’s costs will change over time, captured in the mid-range plan.

More in What do we mean by “strategy”?.

2. Align to the business strategy

Every business has a strategy, even if it is hard to find, and it should drive every department’s strategy, IT included. I find it helps to look at the business strategy through four perspectives, each of which creates a narrative for IT:

• Financial or stakeholder: revenue growth means more transactions and capacity; cost pressure might slow infrastructure renewal.
• Customer: changes in customer behaviour shift where IT effort and money go, and spark new services.
• Operational: divisional performance, plus the social and environmental agenda, including the carbon footprint of the cloud services we buy.
• People: headcount and hybrid working, and increasingly employee engagement and learning.

Put together, these show IT as much more than putting laptops on desks. More in Is IT aligned to the Business?.

If you can’t find a published business strategy, look to the mission, the CEO’s reports and executives’ communications (IT or Data Strategy blocked by missing Business Strategy). The sustainability section of the annual report is the easiest part of the business strategy to obtain, and it links directly to IT: carbon use, equipment disposal, paper, ethical supply chains. It can be the first step to IT being seen as a strategic stakeholder rather than a back-office cost centre. More in Sustainability is a gift for the IT Strategy.

3. Make sure it is complete

If stakeholders can point to areas you left out, they will doubt your recommendations. Not every system is run by the IT team, and those exceptions still belong in the IT strategy, or it becomes an inward-looking exercise.

Organisation charts won’t tell you who does what. A capability model will: map your applications to the business functions. A function with no application may be fine (it might run on Excel), may be an opportunity for IT, or may be hiding a SaaS application you didn’t know about. Either way, a gap has to be justified, not ignored. More in Unknown Unknowns in Data and IT Strategy.

4. Scan the horizon, but limit it

Horizon scanning, the early detection of changes in technology, process or environment, sits naturally within IT strategy work and is a great way to engage the wider IT team. As a geek I love it, so I have to limit my time. I focus on four areas:

• Landscape gaps that emerging approaches might close
• Competitor innovation, from established competitors and new entrants
• Emerging technologies catching the team’s eye
• Emerging methods catching the team’s eye

Only the top three to six opportunities make it into the strategy. The rest go on a watch list. More in Horizon scanning an IT leadership skill.

5. Get closer to the strategy team

Computing in business grew bottom up, from automating finance and operations, so product and corporate strategy are often the capabilities IT supports least. That can leave IT and the strategy team as strangers, with IT slow to respond to changes it didn’t see coming. The data team often has that relationship already, because advanced analytics is central to strategy work, so peering with the data team is a good way in. More in IT Strategy: Bottoms Up.

6. Plan for the whole IT team

When we set objectives for our own team, we can improve one cog and push the stress onto the next. An IT strategy looks at the whole IT team, across the service, the assets we manage, operations and our ability to change, so its objectives strengthen the connecting cogs too (IT Strategy Drives Worthwhile New Year Resolution).

Part of the plan is managing technical debt: a design authority that decides which debts are rejected, accepted with a fix, or accepted for the longer term, and a roadmap that brings the debt down (Managing Technical Debt). And however well you know the work, you need a plan. I break mine into epics, features and stories on an agile board (I don’t need a plan is always a myth).

7. Time it for the budget, and keep it fresh

Budgets still run annually, and the IT strategy and mid-range plan underpin them, so have the strategy ready by around the fifth month of the financial year (Start Your IT or Data Strategy Today).

But in a fast-moving business, an annual refresh can make IT look out of step. You don’t have to rewrite everything to keep it evergreen. Keep the strategic plan updated as it progresses, use event-triggered updates when the business changes, relay pieces of the narrative in team communications, and make the strategy modular, like a well-designed system, so only the affected sections and the executive summary need rework. More in Is an evergreen IT Strategy an imperative?.

Go further

I go through the whole process step by step, including the modular structure, in my Udemy course Developing an IT Strategy. For the data side, see my companion guide, How to Write a Data Strategy That Gets Acted On.

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