Transcript Document

IT Strategy: The Critical Link Between Success
and Failure
t
Plan for the Day
• IT Strategy Concepts
• IT Strategy Components
• IT Contribution to Mission
Success
• IT Principles
• Wrap Up
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IT Strategy – Just Part of the Picture
The IT Strategy Canon
Political or
Legislative
Agenda
Executive
Leadership
Summary
One- or two-page summary of the strategy board, typically in
a horizontal (PowerPoint) format
IT Strategy
Fifteen- to twenty-page description of the direction, as-is to tobe states, typically in a vertical (Word) or horizontal
(PowerPoint) format
IT Strategic Plan
A description of the plan to get from as-is to to-be states —
fundamentally an elaborated Gantt chart
IT Operating Plan
Detailed description of current IT operations, including
budgets, service catalogs, staff and skills, application
portfolio, infrastructure assets
IT Budget
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IT Strategy Template
Executive Summary
Demand
Control
Supply
D1. Business Context
C1. IT Principles
S1. IT Services
D2. Business Success
C2. IT Governance
S2. Enterprise Architecture
D3. Business Capabilities
C3. IT Financial
Management
S3. People
D4. IT Contribution
C4. Metrics
S4. Sourcing
R1. Risks and Issues
Detailed Appendixes
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IT Contribution to the Business Success
• Connects IT activities to mission
success and mission capabilities.
• This section should be used in very
high-level presentations (for
example, the most senior
leadership team) and represents
an two minute overview of how IT
adds value to the organization.
• For example, it could be, "By
making mission and business
process costs more variable, IT will
reduce the impact of demand
volatility.”
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Examples: IT Contributions to Business Success
Workforce Productivity

By reducing the complexity of the information access, users will be able to access and
use a broader variety of business and partner systems without additional training and
minimal loss of time – thereby improve workforce productivity.
Collaboration

By implementing an enterprise security model coupled with a tiered collaboration
capability, users can rapidly create planning and coordination teams across lines of
business and agencies in response to Ad Hoc or newly formed organizational
alignments
 This same tiered collaboration capability can be used to provide sustained partner
engagement with the various key partner organizations before, during, and after new
product rollout
Decision Support

By implementing Authoritative Source Data and reducing data clutter, decision makers
will be able to access the correct information faster in support of their decision making
process.
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Breakout Assignment
• 6 minutes
• Identify 2-3 IT commitments to
help your organization achieve
success
• 2 minutes to present findings
to the person next to you
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IT Principles
• Clearly connected to mission
or organizational success.
• Specific to the enterprise — it
should avoid truisms that apply
to all IT organizations, such as,
"We will provide high-quality,
reliable IT services."
• Detailed enough to drive
decisions, behaviors and
trade-offs.
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Common Areas for IT Principles
Why IT Does Things
How IT Does Things
• Governance — How do we make decisions?
Is decision-making centralized or
decentralized? How fast do we need
decisions to be made?
• Architecture — Where do we need to build
for growth? Divestment? Efficiency? Agility?
Where should the architecture be
standardized, and where should it be
differentiated?
• Investment Prioritization — What
investments do we prioritize? Based on what?
How do we fund our development?
• Innovation — How innovative do we need to
be? Where is it most important to innovate?
• Standardization and Integration — How do
we balance these two processes in a way that
meets the need for central compliance and
local responsiveness? Where should we be
globally standard? Where should we allow for
local differentiation?
• Risk — Where is it acceptable to take more
risk? Where does risk have to be minimized
as much as possible? What is the threshold
of risk beyond which we will never go?
• Staffing — How do we hire? How do we
treat our employees? Do we promote from
within or hire from outside?
• Security — When does security trump all
other considerations? Where do we need to
trade security for speed?
• Benefits Realization — What benefits are
most important? Which ones will we
prioritize, and where? How crucial is it to see
benefits accrue quickly?
• Sourcing — What will we always
outsource? What will we never outsource?
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Examples of IT Principles
Enterprise
Strategic
Success Driver
IT Principles
Gaming
Enterprise
Insurance
Enterprise
Hospitality
Enterprise
Agility in the face of
regulatory change
We must be able to disengage from any
vendor within two to three years
Excellence in absorptionstyle acquisitions
The company must be able to grow on
demand, possibly in large steps
Retail
Enterprise
Public Agency
Operational excellence
We will converge to a single operating
model across all our lines of business
Need to support extremely
remote sites
All DFID systems to be used overseas
must deliver acceptable performance
over satellite connections.
Growth through cross-sales Everything should be decentralized
where business units do
unless we agree it is a commodity
not like to collaborate
Format for IT Principles
• Principle X – Title
• Statement
–Sentence or two that defines the principle
• Rationale
–Sufficient discussion to explain to both IT and non-IT readers the
rationale for this principle.
• Implications
–Series of bullets or statements that illustrate what this principle
will mean in daily application. Use as many as necessary.
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Breakout Assignment
• 5 minutes
• Identify 1 IT Principle, the
Organization Strategic
Success Driver, and the
Rationale to guide your
organization’s decision making
process
• 2 minutes to present findings
to the other person next to you
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What Next
• Engage with Organizational
Leadership to clarify the Demand
Sections of the IT Strategy
• Get Agreement from Organizational
Leadership on the IT Contributions to
Business/Mission Success
• Work with your IT leadership team to
draft a set of IT Principles
• Validate the IT Principles with
Organizational Leadership
• Work the remaining sections of the IT
Strategy Template
Related Gartner Research
• IT Strategy Template, 06 April 2009, Dave Aron G00167280
• Toolkit: How to Create a One-Page IT Strategy, 22 February 2013,
Heather Colella G00245389
• Effective Communications: IT Strategy, 11 September 2009,
Heather Colella G00170978
• Gartner's Guide to Creating World-Class IT Principles, 26 July 2013,
Mary Mesaglio | Jose Ruggero G00253902
For Research Documents, please leverage the sign up sheet to
request or contact Jannine Salo at [email protected]
Gartner has been working with and
supporting Tribal Nations and Enterprises
for over thirteen years delivering the
technology-related insight necessary for
our clients to make the right decisions,
every day.
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Artifact Descriptions
• IT strategy:
–Meets the three- to five-year business needs from IT
–Provides high-level direction and constraints on IT decisions
–Identifies current and desired future state for IT operations and services
• IT strategic plan:
–Lays out a road map of initiatives and capability building to get from current to future IT state
–Contains a 12- to 18-month prioritized plan and key programmatic initiatives with longer-term
road map
–Describes the plan — when, how and what will be affected
• IT operating plan:
–Summarizes the people, processes and budgets that are necessary for the IT strategic plan to
be delivered; it is often referred to as a "concept of operations"
–Includes organizational structures, operations and processes
–Establishes the estimated budget of the investment plan, as well as the financial and
performance management process for accountability
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Example Mission Strategic Capability Statements –
Public Sector
• Cost focus (drawing on the value
discipline of operational excellence):
– Provide services at the lowest cost.
– Drive economies of scale through shared best
practices.
• Value or performance as perceived by
customers or citizens (drawing on the
value discipline of customer intimacy):
– Meet citizen expectations for quality at a
reasonable cost.
– Make citizen access as easy as possible.
– Provide all the information needed to service any
client from any service point.
• Management orientation (different
aspects of business governance and
decision making):
– Maximize independence in local operations with a
minimum of mandates.
– Make management decisions close to the line.
– Create a management culture of information
sharing.
• Increase service (how the base services
will expand):
– Deliver new/expanded services as promised by
political leaders or mandated legislatively.
– Expand aggressively into underserved
communities.
– Carefully grow nationally to meet the needs of
customers who are growing in different parts of
the country.
– Target adoption through specific demographic or
citizen segments.
• Human resources (where people policies
fit in):
– Create an environment that maximizes intellectual
productivity.
– Identify and facilitate the movement of talented
people.
• Flexibility and agility (drawing on the
value discipline of service innovation):
– Grow in cross-delivery capabilities.
– Develop new or expanded services rapidly.
– Create the capacity to deliver services in any
location for a particular entitlement.
Business Context
• The value proposition (what role, responsibility or value the
organization provides to which demographic groups and citizens)
• The organization’s position relative to other companies,
organizations, or agencies about the provisioning or delivery of
products or services
• The organization’s operating and delivery model — for example,
decentralized operations, delivery direct to consumers, etc.
• The demographic or social trends impacting the organization’s
business
• External macro level drivers, such as policy, macroeconomic and
political environments
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Business Success
• This section clarifies what will make the enterprise deliver on its
promises.
• Ideally consists of no more than the two or three major strategies
• Contains the organization’s mission, vision, goals and
mission/operating principles.
• This is a critical section of the strategy, because it defines the focus
of the organization, which is used to drive the investments and
trade-offs in IT.
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Business Capabilities
• Defines what business capabilities are required to make the
organization successful
• Identifies where the gaps are between existing and needed
capabilities.
• Examples of mission capabilities include
–Ability to partner with other tribal, federal, or private organizations
–Ability to respond to the unexpected
–Transparency of performance metrics.
–This list should be at a strategic level; typically, there should be
no more than four or five capabilities.
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Remaining Control Sections
• C2 — A demand-side and supply-side governance strategy. This will
facilitate and enable the work to proceed smoothly and provide the
necessary decision making, policy definition, oversight and problem
resolution.
• C3 — IT funding and financial management options. It develops an
approach to how the IT organization is operating as a cost center,
profit center or investment center. It also explains how funds will be
supplied to IT.
• C4 — A performance management plan. This identifies the elements
of performance to be measured and the metrics that will be used to
measure them.
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Examples of Alternate Strategies
Component
Example
Example Goal 1 The XYZ casino will expand facilities by 30% in the next 4 years.
Alternative
Strategy
Examples for
Goal 1

Expand organically by reinvesting current revenues into expansion of facilities.

Partner with external gaming operator to fund expansion.

Explore the opportunity a public debt offering to fund the expansion.
Example Goal 2 Within three years, the XYZ casino will decrease cost of sales by 15%.
Alternative
Strategy
Examples for
Goal 2

Focus marketing to increase attendance during non-peak times to leverage
existing fixed cost operations.

Adopt an overtime policy to reduce new hire and personnel costs.

Move to automated self-service for food, drink, and information services.

Increase use of data analytics to reduce fixed cost operations and move to
95% variable cost operations.