Nazih Battal, Chief Technology Officer, Rashays
An IT strategy should be one of the first things a leader in IT establishes. This establishes the foundation for the following three to five years and ought to be incorporated into the broader business strategy, mission, and vision.
The following are some crucial outcomes of any IT strategy:
Understandable
All significant stakeholders should be able to read and comprehend an IT plan with ease. Unjustified language overuse makes the plan challenging to comprehend and apply, leading to misinterpretations of its specifics or even crucial elements. Clarity aids managers in understanding where to guide their staff. Additionally, the IT leadership may shift, making it simpler for new management to handle a succinct, comprehensive approach.
Aligned with business
An IT strategy is about how to use IT solutions to serve future business demands, not about how to win an innovation race and cram daily operations with IT gimmicks. IT-business alignment makes ensuring that systems and apps are used in a way that helps the organisation gain the upper hand.
Staged
A plan can be implemented in stages, giving you more control and making performance evaluation simpler. Additionally, it enables the introduction of necessary adjustments with little discomfort by allowing insight into the nature of implicit and explicit weak points.
Cost-effective
Without taking the financial aspect into account, strategic planning is impossible. There are many chances on the market, therefore it's important to pick out the ones that are worth investing in. This will provide a return on investment and protect against unpleasant shocks, such as unforeseen costs.
Moderately future-oriented
Two factors are balanced in a strong IT strategy: supporting ongoing operations and planning for the future (new architecture, new systems, new technologies). Some corporate and IT leaders don't spend enough time developing long-term strategies and only concentrate on solving immediate issues.
It prevents potentially profitable businesses from making quick decisions and fostering long-term growth.
An effective IT strategy goes beyond simply streamlining internal business procedures. Additionally, it helps to create new market opportunities and increases client happiness.
Things to Watch
Out For Even a strategy that can work well for your company can backfire if you neglect to take into account a number of crucial factors.
Unrealistic goals
Even a plan that appears to be effective may be too difficult and expensive to adopt. Business executives and IT managers looking for business-supporting IT components are misled by unrealistic goals.
Unexpected difficulties
Every business will experience changes, and changes always present difficulties. Consider a merger and acquisition as an illustration. Cooperating businesses must decide which apps to employ in a joint venture, as well as how to integrate corporate intranets, databases, and other IT-related difficulties. It's also a difficult undertaking because every business is accustomed to adhering to its own IT plan, and it takes time, effort, and expertise to align various strategies. Underappreciated obstacles are ticking time bombs that can blow up your company at any moment.
Keep in mind that a company wastes time, money, and human resources by adopting a poor IT agenda. It's a surefire method to lose ground to other businesses.
Poor IT strategy
The failure to organize ideas thoroughly and succinctly and connect them in a logical strategy can entirely ruin even the best analytical work and sophisticated concepts.
Even a Strategy that Can Work Well for your Company can Backfire if you Neglect to Take into Account a Number of Crucial Factors
• Ineffective ideas rather than a well-thought-out plan. Senior management making the mistake of thinking that a disjointed plan is a cohesive strategy is a severe problem. The collection of plans first resembles a strategy in many ways. But a closer examination can reveal that these schemes conflict with one another.
• Verbosity. Many out-of-scope statements and trite language virtually never help with the development of a sound strategy. Giving more information about certain IT concepts and phenomena makes sense, but providing too many unnecessary details might make a strategy awkward and hard to comprehend.
The sooner you realise this, the more time you have to rescue some truly outstanding ideas and proceed with an effective digital transformation.
The development and implementation of a desirable strategy is a particularly difficult undertaking, even when the descriptions of good and bad strategies seem straightforward. Even effective IT strategies need to be reviewed and adjusted over time to remain effective in the market because it is an unpredictably changing environment with sharp twists. It's never too late to acknowledge mistakes, put a stop to inefficient behaviour, and make room for new advantages.
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