Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy
Success depends on IT initiatives clearly aligned to business goals, IT excellence, and driving technology innovation.
Unlock This BlueprintBlueprint Contents:
1. Business-Aligned IT Strategy Deck – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to properly align with the business, achieve IT excellence, and drive technology innovation.
Align with the business by creating an IT strategy that documents the business context, key initiatives, and a strategic roadmap. To create a business-aligned IT strategy, you must understand what the business does and what the business will need. Only then can a carefully thought-out, strategic and tactical plan be created for execution.
This storyboard will help you build your IT mission and vision statements and IT guiding principles, elicit business context from the CIO and the IT team, identify your key initiatives and build their profiles, construct your strategic roadmap, and evaluate your governance structures, budget, and organizational changes.
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Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy – Phases 1-4
2. Business Context Interview Guide – An interview guide to help you elicit the business context by interviewing business leaders and peers.
Use this template as a starting point to interview your business leaders to elicit the business context. The goal of the interviews is to extract business goals, organizational priorities, and business initiatives that will play a critical role in building your IT strategy. Meet with your executive team and work with them to identify essential knowledge.
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Business Context Interview Guide
3. IT Presentation Template – A best-of-breed template to help you build a clear, concise, and compelling strategy document for stakeholders.
This presentation template uses sample data from "Acme Corp" to demonstrate an ideal IT strategy. Use this template to document your final strategy outputs including executive-facing business alignment and strategy highlights, key initiatives and summaries, strategic roadmap, budget proposal, IT goals and operating model, functional project roadmaps, and year-in-review data to highlight IT success stories.
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IT Strategy Presentation Template
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Strategy-on-a-Page Template
4. IT Strategy Workbook – A structured tool to help you prioritize IT strategy activities and build a roadmap to ensure success.
This tool guides an IT department in planning and prioritization activities to build an effective IT strategy. This Excel workbook guides you through making key decisions regarding the visuals that should be incorporated into your final presentation document. Key activities include building a goals cascade visual that shows the relationships between business and IT goals, initiatives, and capabilities; prioritizing key initiatives using a balanced scorecard approach; and building the IT strategy roadmap using a Gantt chart visual to showcase project execution timelines.
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IT Strategy Workbook
Your Challenge
IT strategies are often nonexistent or ineffective:
- 74.6% of organizations have an IT strategy process they feel is ineffective.
- IT does not do a good job of communicating its support for business goals; therefore, 23.6% of CXOs still feel that their goals are unsupported by IT.
IT departments that have not developed IT strategies experience alignment, organization, and prioritization issues.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- A CIO has three roles: enable business productivity, run an effective IT shop, and drive technology innovation. Your key initiative plan must reflect these three mandates and how IT strives to fulfill them.
- Don’t project your vision three to five years into the future. Dive deep on next year’s big-ticket items instead.
- Developing an IT strategy is a wasted effort if no mechanisms are put in place to govern the journey.
- If you don’t communicate it, it doesn’t exist; simple, appealing, and inspirational communication is needed.
Impact and Result
- Establish the scope of your IT strategy by defining IT’s mission and vision statements and guiding principles.
- Perform a retrospective of IT’s performance to recognize the current state while highlighting important strategic elements to address going forward.
- Elicit the business context and identify strategic initiatives that are most important to the organization while building a plan to execute on it.
- Evaluate the foundational elements of IT’s operational strategy that will be required to successfully execute on key initiatives.
- Wrap all strategic information into a highly visual and compelling presentation that enables easy customization and executive-facing content.
Member Testimonials
After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.
9.4/10
Overall Impact
$74,847
Average $ Saved
34
Average Days Saved
Client
Experience
Impact
$ Saved
Days Saved
City of Arlington
Workshop
10/10
$64,999
10
The workshop afforded our IT team members an opportunity collaborate and establish a renewed focus for our organizational IT Strategy. Our initial ... Read More
Bob Barker Company, Inc.
Guided Implementation
10/10
$12,999
10
Best - Having someone to bounce ideas off of. Worst - Trying to create a 5-year strategy.
United Nations Office at Vienna (UNOV)
Workshop
10/10
N/A
50
Only good words to give. Outcomes were beyond my expectations -- beyond what we set off to produce, we had a joint learning and teambuilding experi... Read More
Frederick County Maryland
Workshop
7/10
N/A
N/A
The true value of this effort canot be assessed ubtil we publish a strategic plan and use it to guide our effort moving forward. This excercise wa... Read More
City Of North Port
Guided Implementation
10/10
N/A
20
This saved me a ton of time and presents more information in a better format than I would have ever been able to create on my own. I wasn't sure ho... Read More
City of Atlanta / Atlanta Information Management (AIM)
Workshop
10/10
$45,499
35
Exceeded expectations. Chuck was excellent to work with and I’m happy with the tools and topics covered.
Dakota County Government Center
Workshop
10/10
$1.3M
120
Best parts were: 1. seeing key stakeholders in person and having them particpate in conversation with the other stakeholders 2. The herding of c... Read More
Hume City Council
Guided Implementation
10/10
$64,999
10
Great template, good knowledge of the domain in which industry we operate. Great guidance and assistance in challenging the status quo, ideas and ... Read More
Lake County, FL
Workshop
10/10
$32,499
29
Being able to complete this within a few days was extremely valuable. I think it would have taken us at least an additional 30 days or longer to co... Read More
Xavier University
Workshop
9/10
$64,999
41
Worst - It is hard to commit to so much time in one week. There is no way around such a time commitment. Best - walking away from the table hav... Read More
Jake's Finer Foods, Inc
Workshop
10/10
$64,999
10
MDU Services LTD
Workshop
9/10
$16,400
10
Best part great group participation and agreed outputs - great facilitation worst part this year we were at a rush to get this delivered. We will ... Read More
Government of Bermuda
Workshop
10/10
$12,999
23
Chuck French and team did a wonderful job in capturing and condensing the workshop information into a few informative slides. Janice did a great j... Read More
OTIP/RAEO Benefits Incorporated
Guided Implementation
10/10
$25,000
20
Best - Toolsets and process look to fit very well with what i want to accomplish and the time i have available. Worst - don't have one at this p... Read More
County of Los Alamos
Workshop
10/10
$97,499
41
Best - how prepared your Team was. How they knew exactly where to lead us very quickly. How understanding and insightful they were Worst - the poo... Read More
Pitt County
Guided Implementation
9/10
N/A
20
The conversation was a dialogue between us and different perspectives were discussed that added so much more value. Previous reviews and discussio... Read More
Wiginton Corporation
Guided Implementation
8/10
N/A
5
Dataflux Pty. Ltd.
Guided Implementation
8/10
$3,899
5
Best - knowledgeable input regarding the blueprint Worst - n/a
County of San Luis Obispo
Workshop
10/10
$32,499
10
Best: Continued to be extremely impressed with Infotech's workshop methodology and its ability to produce a comprehensive draft with finding and re... Read More
Oregon State Police
Guided Implementation
10/10
$6,499
14
Working with Manish was very helpful for me to float ideas back and forth, his knowledge really helped make my Strategic plan document to a solid f... Read More
Commonwealth of Virginia - Office of the Attorney General
Workshop
10/10
$2,469
12
Chuck was able to keep us on track and offer relevant suggestions and guidance, using appropriate questions to draw out key details from the team. ... Read More
Yamaha Motor Corporation, U.S.A.
Workshop
10/10
$519K
23
Areez was totally engaging, jelled well with the team and help lead them along the journey. He was clear and articulate, answered questions on poin... Read More
East Bay Municipal Utility District
Workshop
9/10
$32,499
32
I am still estimating time and money saved, so this is a rough, rough estimate in terms of how much less time the EBMUD IT strategic planning proce... Read More
University of Southern Indiana
Workshop
10/10
$20,799
10
Our workshop went very well! Very much appreciated some of the time saving techniques Claudia used to allow us to focus discussion on things that w... Read More
South African Reserve Bank
Guided Implementation
9/10
$7,799
18
I had a very good engagement with Ross and my experience so far is excellent.
City of Flagstaff
Workshop
7/10
N/A
20
Overall, I would say Denis was a mix of excellent advice mixed with a bit too much talking about his personal opinion. We got a lot of value but sp... Read More
Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures
Workshop
10/10
$32,499
10
It was a Great week and thought everything was done Professionally. Thanks for all the hard work and now we need to get to work. Loved how ev... Read More
City of St. Louis
Guided Implementation
10/10
$64,999
115
Ross really helped me frame our first ever strategic plan. He was excellent at explaining concepts and helping me see how I could articulate our I... Read More
Oregon State Fire Marshal
Guided Implementation
8/10
$12,999
20
AWJ Tamkeen Company
Guided Implementation
9/10
$5,000
20
Only best part; deep knowledge and expertise, provide valuable insights by strong communication skills were they clear, concise with professional b... Read More