IT Strategic Planning

Obstacles

Effective organizations optimize IT resource allocation by establishing a clear link between business strategy and IT initiatives. However, nearly 77% of business executives feel that IT strategic planning, as currently practiced, is ineffective. The following are common challenges with IT strategic planning:

  • IT planning is often done in a vacuum without considering the impact on business strategy.
  • Key stakeholders within IT and the business are not aware of the link between IT investments and business strategies.
  • Business partners do not fully recognize the value of IT investments, particularly those aimed at upgrading aging systems.
  • Business needs are ever evolving, causing IT plans and resource allocation to become out of sync.

Solution

Step 1: Link IT Intiatives to Business Goals

  • Connect every IT change or project to business goals, and communicate the alignment to business executives.
  • Assess the risk and value of all items, execution timelines, and their relationships to one another and to other items in the roadmap.

 

How CEB IT Roadmap Builder Can Help

  • A clear, compelling visualization displays all IT plans and projects and their alignment to business strategies.
  • Define timelines, costs, and dependencies once, and reflect these in all visuals.

Step 2: Get Buy-In from the Business

  • Provide the business units with a complete view into the path and resources required to achieve their goals, both for an individual project and all projects that support a business goal.
  • Prioritize implementation decisions by considering the risk, costs, and impact of interrelated projects.

 

How CEB IT Roadmap Builder Can Help

  • A flexible framework captures and manages the costs associated with the technology plans, and a report summarizes costs by each business goal.
  • An intuitive visualization (Goal View) displays projects and their connection to a goal, allowing clear visibility at all levels in the organization.

Step 3: Make It a Living Document

  • Sustain business support for IT investments by keeping IT plans updated to reflect business needs.
  • Determine the impact of changes across the enterprise-wide IT plan.

 

How CEB IT Roadmap Builder Can Help

  • Update and maintain roadmaps with ease—make a single change to the roadmap data and see it propagate across all stakeholder views automatically.
  • Make the latest roadmaps available to the entire team—CEB IT Roadmap Builder offers unlimited read-only user licensing to ensure all team members across the enterprise can reference the latest roadmap.
  • Checkpoint roadmaps every quarter and compare to previous versions to ensure roadmaps are evolving.