Is our Information Technology environment properly managed, maintained, secured, able to support the clients, and is it cost effective? At the top of the pyramid is the enterprise overarching vision. The template includes the following sections: Purpose of plan The documents should be hierarchical, with the ability to drill down to lower levels as more detail is required. For example, an initial review of the organization's existing strategic IT plan and related documents is a good first step in any IT strategy. But companies need to have the right metrics in place to be able to support the shift of the underlying value equation. CEOs and CFOs task new CIOs and old CIOs alike with developing an IT strategy. Achieving business objectives through technology standards, By Serge Thorn, Enterprise Architecture Consultant. Are we making the right technology investments? A one-year cycle may be too late. Emerging technologies, business related benefits, This can be done in parallel with the Enterprise Architecture program, Summary or link to the IT Project portfolio, Direct relationship with Enterprise Architecture, Indirect relationship with Enterprise Architecture. And most important of all, develop several versions of your presentation to suit the different audiences for your material. -Clarify any areas of ambiguity The first approach is a very classical one where you develop a questionnaire in business terms which asks each business unit to identify their future requirements for infrastructure growth, taking into account capacity and availability requirements. Identified strategic capabilities with an assessment of each (Green/Yellow/Red). In 2012 Forrester assembled the best components from the many strategies reviewed over the years and, in conjunction with Forrester Leadership Boards CIO members, identified the key contents for an effective BT and IT strategy. Without these, your business or organization wont have the proper reasons to function. -Define constraints It may look similar to this example below: The second approach is where Enterprise Architecture will play an important and even crucial role. University IT is the worldâs leading higher education IT organization, partnering with faculty, staff, students, and alumni to advance Stanfordâs unparalleled research, teaching, learning, and healthcare mission. Every governance frameworks may have its own KPIs. SWOT Analysis (organizational and external environment and competition). To help you succeed, use this proven strategic plan template, and the information below details the 13 key sections you must include in ⦠The âstrategy documentâ represents a challenge for IT as it must serve as both a marketing document to be shared with non-IT leaders and also as a ⦠A list of simple strategic plan examples in PDF are available for you to download in this post. Human capital management and strategic workforce planning are absolute essentials for IT strategic planning as are service strategies. For all intents and purpose of this post, weâve put together below a short list of common strategic objectives. Are we doing the right things with technology to address the organization’s most important business priorities and continuously deliver value to the clients? Just as there are varying models for the document itself, there are multiple ways to approach creating an IT strategy. Please accept cookies or get more information. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, only 18% of organizations have IT teams that communicate the value of IT effectively. Focus on the future and keep your company moving forward with JotFormâs Strategic Plan Template. The ideal BT strategy is one that clearly connects technology spending with achieving the goals of the enterprise. Enterprise Architecture KPIs may be added to that list. An Enterprise Architecture must play the important role of assessing existing IT assets, architecture standards and the desired business strategy to create a unified enterprise-wide environment – where the core hardware and software systems are standardized and integrated across the entire organization’s business processes, to greatly enhance competitive advantage and innovation. These can be short term or long term, can be driven by revenue, cost, time, time to market, competitive advantage, risk or various other reasons. What will we gain by leveraging IT Capabilities across the business? What is in the way of achieving your business imperatives? As a real example, TOGAF® 9 is perfect way to produce the IT Strategy document during the Phase F: Migration Planning. Steps to Create an IT Strategic Plan: Step 1: Build ⦠Here’s a riddle: What is it that almost every organization believes it needs, many organizations have, and few organizations use? Does your company have a plan for technology? IT budget, costs structures, measurement and metrics, targets, areas needing investments, etc. It is not easy to pitch a strategy to different levels in the hierarchy within an organization, and at the appropriate level of detail. IT principles should have already have been defined by the IT department, IT Governance is defined outside the Enterprise Architecture program. How much do you spend on IT capabilities? From the start, the project champion had found it hard to get his VP to under - stand the need for and importance of a data strategy⦠This questionnaire may include some of the following examples of questions: With this input you may now start to consider the structure of your document. -Enterprise-wide constraints Weâve assembled a handful of sample strategic plans. -Ensure that descriptions used are current This should be considered the minimum review period. Previous post: 5 Steps to transform IT from order-taker to business partner. Success for a business or organization is a matter of good guidance and following the direction it has from the beginning. If you use the template, I’d love to see your final versions (under NDA as needed of course). A strategic plan is a roadmap to grow your business. -Provides high-level, aspirational view of target the sponsor uses to describe how business goals are met and stakeholder concerns are addressed The business strategy also guides many of your organizational decisions, such as hiring new employees. Several times responsible for the Enterprise Architecture team in an international bank, Serge has wide experience in the deployment and management of information systems in Private Banking and Wealth Management environments, and also in the IT architectures domains, Internet, dealing rooms, inter-banking networks, Middle and Back-office. A template provides structure for your business planning process as well as a communication tool thatâs simple to update or modify. Download Sample Test Strategy Document: Click the below download button to download the sample Test_Strategy_Document. IT Strategy is a strong alignment of business and IT capabilities rather than designing IT solutions to support business requirements, Assuming that both business and IT capabilities drive each other, Assuming that business drives IT and not the other way around, IT Strategy sets future direction for IT function in the organization, Ensuring that the IT budget is spent on value creation activities for the business, Helping to maximize the return on IT investments. The plan is valuable not only to help you plot a course of action to ensure you meet your goals, but itâs an important document to help staff, shareholders, stakeholders and potential investors to see the âbig pictureâ for your company. There are different ways of gathering these business inputs. I have observed many situations where a C-level person was supposed to document an IT Strategy in a short period of time, in order to prepare the following year’s annual budget. Strategic Values. This free IT strategic plan template spells out simple yet effective procedures for aligning IT strategy with your company's strategic objectives and initiatives. Strategic objectives are one of the fundamental building blocks of your strategic plan. Very often, they lack much supporting documented business information in order to achieve this task. The template is a skeleton – pick what you like and discard the rest. Conclusion: Test strategy document gives a clear vision of what the test team will do for the whole project. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Geopolitical trends with expected business impact. Can our strategy support current and future business needs? -Provides an executive summary version of full Architecture You focused almost entirely on technology (right technology, right way, right return) with no regard for the services and people. Enterprise Architecture is the superset that represents both Business and IT Strategy; this is reflected in Enterprise Architecture’s basic structure of strategy, business architecture and technology/information architecture. Marketing project plan template. These are things that you wish you had a solution for, What are your top 5 business objectives? Consider the example of a consulting team helping a large bank to develop a data strategy. Once the IT Strategy has been reviewed, amended and authorized (which should in reality already be approved, as it is the result of various ADM cycles and the output of Phase F: Migration planning), the multi-disciplinary program team for the implementation during Phase G: Implementation Governance, will deliver the solutions to the business. Sometimes it is too detailed and does not always match the stakeholder’s needs. In table below, you will find the relationship between some phases of the TOGAF® Architecture Development Method (ADM) and the structure of the Executive Summary document (see above). Future plans, concerns, time period, priorities), Baseline (servers, network , middleware, technical services), Issues, challenges, opportunities related to security, security principles, controls, Security concerns are addressed during all phases of the ADM. Best practices, frameworks, management and monitoring, resource management, portfolio management, vendors management, IT service management, project management, etc. Management Of Information Systems | Information Technology, Introduction (this document must be business oriented), Key elements of the scope, audience, time horizon, Market conditions, competition, consumer trends, new customers, products sales, costs savings, incremental services revenues, drivers related to the IT function, Profitability, financial performance, change in strategic objectives, end of the product development life cycle, mergers and acquisitions, staffs, risks, Considering that IT is part of the Business, these drivers should also be considered in that phase, Market growth, entering new markets, addressing manufacturing capacities, IT standards, development, implementation, delivery, testing, consolidation, maturity, best practices, Standards should be documented in the SIB (Standard Information Base), Baseline (main applications: ERP, CRM, customers facing systems). Plans are selected and refined from this template. The IT strategy is the foundation upon which CIOs communicate the value of IT across the enterprise. Traditionally, IT strategies are updated and communicated on an annual basis, usually to meet budget cycles. The “strategy document” represents a challenge for IT as it must serve as both a marketing document to be shared with non-IT leaders and also as a set of practical guidelines for IT professionals. The next step would be the review of the IT Strategy document by the main stakeholders who would accept or reject technology opportunities. The success of a marketing plan relies on setting clear goalsâincluding specific metrics and outlining the steps your team will take to get there. Aligned below is how IT supports the vision by becoming a premier IT organization in creating competitive advantage for the clients. Enterprise Architecture skills will have to be addressed by the Architecture Capability Framework. Effective business technology strategy must be anchored in the business goals since the strategy effectively sets out the path to achieve the goals – the BT strategy template clearly presents the choices being made in technology direction for the organization and makes it easy to see how these choices will help the organization achieve the goals. Next post: Chief Digital Officer: Fad or Future? Emerging technology trends with expected business impact. IT strategic planning must be firmly rooted in the business strategic plan â period. Serge’s competency covers the understanding of banking activities, and industries such as Pharma/Biotech, the design of new systems, IT Strategies, IT Governance, Innovation, new technologies, Enterprise Architecture (including Business Architecture, BPM, Business Process Analysis, Six Sigma-Lean, TOGAF® 9.1, ArchiMate®), Cloud, Digitization, Strategic Planning, Service Management (ITIL V 3), Quality Management, team management, project and portfolio management (PMI/SDLC), IT Finance, organization. People and demographic trends with expected business impact. This could also be used as an important source of information for the Strategic Planning exercise (please refer to another article for additional information: “How Strategic Planning relates to Enterprise Architecture?“). Serge Thorn is an experienced and passionate Enterprise Architecture/Business Transformation professional, consultant, and trainer with many years’ of experience using the TOGAF® ADM and ArchiMate®, an open modeling language for EA. The answer is an IT strategy. How do you plan to achieve these objectives? If an emerging technology surfaces that has the potential to enhance the business, it should be investigated and communicated to the business as soon as possible. There will obviously be touch points between the ADM and some other best practices used by the organization. Is our current Information Technology agile enough and flexible to continuously support a successful organization? The essential elements of the business technology strategic plan include: I encourage you to download the BT Strategic Planning template – it’s a Microsoft PowerPoint doc (fee for non-clients). PEST Analysis (Political, economic, social, and technological). Business Technology Strategy elements must walk the reader/listener through the strategy in logical steps beginning with business goals and ending with a flexible technology roadmap that lays out the timing of the strategy implementation. The IT vision is in turn supported by three pillars: integration, improvement, and innovation. A weak IT strategy can be costly and wasteful, especially for resource-constrained organizations that operate with minimal budget, tools, knowledge and people. A strategy statement outlines the specific strategic a⦠Simply fill in the attached form with your company overview, delve deeper with a SWOT analysis, and finish off by determining your strategic goals, actions, and financial plans. Different people with varying roles and responsibilites may read an IT Strategy within a company, so the document may need to serve several different purposes. High-Level Strategic Plan Template With space to record business function recovery priorities, recovery plans, and alternate site locations, this template allows you to plan efficiently for disruption and minimize downtime, so your business maintains optimal efficiency. Can IT help achieve your business imperatives? Serge has also been into ERP and CRM domains. This strategic plan must continuously evolve with the changing needs of the business – as such it must be less of a fixed investment plan for the next X years and more a set of strategic guidelines to help shape future technology decisions. In a Pharmaceutical (Chemical) company, Serge was in charge of the worldwide Enterprise Architecture program and Governance, the IT Research & Innovation, following the reorganization of the IT Department, implementing Service Management based on ITIL Best Practices and deploying new processes: Change, Configuration, Release, and Capacity/Availability Management, responsible for the Disaster Recovery Plan and for the System Management team. One can certainly do an IT Strategy without Enterprise Architecture, but Enterprise Architecture cannot be done without an IT Strategy; the same would apply to business strategy/business architecture. The IT Strategy details the technologies, application and the data foundation needed to deliver the goals of the corporate strategy, while Enterprise Architecture is the bridge between strategy and execution by providing the organizing logic to ensure the integration and standardization of key processes that drive greater agility, higher profitability, faster time to market, lower IT costs, improved access to shared customer data and lower risk of mission-critical systems failures. A strategic plan template is an important document for every organization. The chances of missing any test activity are very low when there is a proper test strategy in place. How Strategic Planning relates to Enterprise Architecture? What technology trends will dominate 2021? A strategic plan is a plan where you set out your goals for the business and a strategy for making them a reality. This extracts the data you need for business driven strategy. Frequently the connection is non-existent or quite weak. Some are from our clients. An IT Strategy should answer the following questions: Quite often the first thing we should consider when writing such a document is the targeted audience and its content. Use this template to document and track your business operations in the event of a disruption or disaster to maintain critical processes. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Impact on strategies for different scenarios. Others are just examples. © 2020 Forrester Research, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. Serge does coaching, mentoring and implementing worldwide in major Business and Technology transformation initiatives at blue chip companies. Writing a Test Strategy effectively is a skill every tester should achieve in their career. This marketing project plan template is incredibly detailed, with sections for ⦠For this reason, Forrester recommends creating at least two documents: First the BT strategic plan – think of this as the brand marketing brochure for IT – it clearly lays out how IT will bring value to the enterprise and how this value will be measured; second, the IT operational plan – this sets out the choices IT leaders must make in order to effectively implement the BT strategy. We use cookies to enable website functionality and to tailor content to your interests. Prepare a document to summarize the Point-of-Failure Analysis which should include: Known or likely Points-of-Failure throughout a system/applicationâs data flow where failure is possible, Identification of the intervals during which a system/application is at risk of failure, and . 7. Customize the template for your own business. It does not contain the fine detail of exact quality checks to be used on each product. 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