InBrief: Developing IT Strategy

What It Is: An overall IT Strategy sets direction for an organization, providing a framework for the services IT provides, along with key dimensions and objectives, with flexibility to evolve over time

Why It Matters: With the ever-increasing demand for innovation in a competitive, but cost-conscious environment, a thoughtful strategy accelerates results, reduces cost and risk, and enables sustainability

Key Concepts

• Technology strategy always needs to be rooted in a business-enabling approach
• It is tempting to over-index on one dimension (e.g., cost management) and sacrifice capability
• Excellence in IT is rooted in having business aligned objectives, with a disciplined approach
• This model is organized around five key dimensions, which should be defined and prioritized
• A simple IT scorecard could be created using how business partners evaluate each dimension
• This article focuses on delivering IT objectives, IT Excellence focuses on “how to operate” in IT

Key Dimensions

Innovate – Promote Competitive Advantage

• Map to business goals, establish a disciplined innovation process aligned to architecture strategy
• Metrics: Increased competitive capabilities, Improved customer satisfaction (int/ext)

Accelerate – Deliver with Quality and Speed

• Optimize investments, promote quality / standards / reuse, facilitate continuous improvement
• Metrics: Reduced time-to-market, increased on-time delivery, increased quality

Optimize – Deliver at the Right Cost of Service

• Reduce complexity, optimize costs, continually modernize, leverage workforce strategy
• Metrics: Increased value/cost ratio, reduced technical debt, reduced complexity

Inspire – Promote Sustainable Productivity and Engagement

• Promote a healthy culture, develop employees, enable collaboration, provide transparency
• Metrics: Low voluntary attrition, high average utilization, high employee satisfaction

Perform – Ensure Production Security, Reliability, and Performance

• Monitor and invest in production health, establish “zero trust”, manage critical vulnerabilities
• Metrics: High availability, low unplanned outages, zero security incidents

For Additional Information: Creating Value Through Strategy, Enterprise Architecture in an Adaptive World

Excellence doesn’t happen by accident.  Courageous leadership is essential.

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more?  Please send me a message.  I’m happy to explore with you.

-CJG 11/25/2025