Few will argue with the importance of strategic planning for IT. Analysts like Gartner have long highlighted the need for continuous business optimization and intentional acquisition when it comes to digital. Companies cannot afford to wait for their application portfolios to become bloated and spiral out of the financial control of the IT organization. Digital efficiency and strategy are increasingly paramount for businesses to be agile and competitive. Ineffective digital spending and infrastructure will only weigh the organization down. So why do organizations continue to fail to plan for IT effectively?
3 Common Pitfalls in Strategic Planning for IT
The challenge lies in putting strategy into action. The larger the organization, the harder it is to get it to move in alignment. This lack of alignment and complexity then feeds into three common problems and pitfalls that organizations struggle to overcome:
1. Lack of Alignment With Business Goals
Often IT planning is not fully aligned with the organization’s overall goals and objectives, leading to inefficiencies and conflicts over resources. Collaboration between IT leaders and business stakeholders is key to ensuring strategic planning for IT is done with the right priorities and aligned with the organization’s broader strategies.*
Another key cause of misalignment is an incomplete understanding of the organization’s IT infrastructure and its capabilities. With the rise of business technologists and more distributed decisions about technological acquisition, no one team has a clear overview of what the business owns and uses. What may seem like an attractive investment into cutting-edge technology can turn out to be problematic and inefficient if it doesn’t integrate well with existing systems and processes.
2. Insufficient Communication and Collaboration
However, the collaboration between IT leaders and business stakeholders can itself be a substantial challenge. Organizations often lack a clear overview of how IT and other teams collaborate to reach objectives. This results in frequent setbacks when business teams have deviating mandates or goals, making it difficult for teams to ensure they’ve looped in all possible stakeholders at the right time. Even the most well-meaning teams who set out to gather diverse perspectives across the organization may find it difficult to do so effectively, lacking the tools to efficiently collate, visualize and disseminate the information they need. The setbacks and misalignment caused by insufficient collaboration lead to wasted effort and a high risk of failure. It is therefore recommended to use effective communication channels to avoid IT fails. One way to do this is to create an app for a seamless communication between IT leaders and business stakeholders.
3. Overestimating Their Ability to Execute
Even with a well-defined IT strategy, organizations often choke on the number of projects in the pipeline. Prioritization becomes critical here, but with so many teams, objectives, and plans involved beyond IT, it’s difficult to know which initiatives will ultimately create the greatest positive impact. Organizations are often subject to sudden changes in resources, direction, or economic circumstances, which means that they must be able to pivot and swiftly reprioritize. Reprioritization presents the same potential obstacles with the added factor of time pressure. When organizations are unable to identify and clearly communicate priorities for execution, IT is unable to get a clear answer on how their strategic plan should be adjusted accordingly, exacerbating misalignment, waste, and inefficiencies.
A Better Way Forward: Dynamic and Data-Driven
Strategic planning is hard, even more so for IT when the organization’s very size and convoluted structure in practice seem to be the largest obstacles to effective technology strategy implementation. However, top management can equip themselves and their organizations with tools and techniques that will help them get better insights for creating smarter plans and decisions.
Improved Decision-Making: Overview of IT Assets and Capabilities
To be successful, digital transformation leaders such as the CIO or CTO need to ensure they have clear visibility over IT assets and how these connect to and enable the businesses’ capabilities. Application Portfolio Management and Business Capability Modeling will provide them with a thorough overview of the organization needed to make more informed decisions regarding IT. This overview will help them identify where the technology gaps and redundancies are in the organization and key points they can incorporate into the overall strategic plan for IT to increase efficiency and optimize spending.
Efficient Resource Allocation: Digital Business Optimization
Once a fundamental overview of IT infrastructure and capabilities is established, an IT leader is then empowered to spot digital business optimization opportunities. Application Rationalization is one such exercise that will help streamline the application catalog, ensuring the business is only paying for what is truly needed. When conducted regularly, IT leaders can be assured of a leaner application portfolio with lower maintenance costs, less wastage on redundant applications that are unused and clearer control over application investments. Another benefit of a leaner portfolio is the standardization of platforms within the organization, reducing the number of varied applications employees need to juggle between.
Risk Management and Compliance: IT Risk Management
A clearer overview of the application portfolio also eases compliance and improves control over potential IT risks. Building off the overview, Data Lineage will allow further vital insight into the business’ data. Enterprise data lineage helps IT leaders understand how and where data is being used across the organization. This is important for several key areas, such as data management, information security, and risk management. An up-to-date understanding of the organization’s most critical data and how it flows can help IT leaders focus security efforts on where it counts most for the business.
Align with Business Goals and Objectives: From Strategy to Execution
All of the previous efforts feed into enabling the organization to better align the business and IT strategically and in action. Strategy to Execution is one expert-crafted approach to aid digital leaders in overcoming the common challenges of strategic planning for IT. It is based on setting clear organization-wide objectives and aligning initiatives in the organization to these objectives. It allows for developing agile business and technology roadmaps and answering the challenging question of what to prioritize on an ongoing basis. Teams are better aligned with valuable contextual information about their efforts and the efforts of other teams, enabling agility and adaptability at every level of the organization.
Learn more about how dynamic digital data-driven tools can help CIOs and IT leaders with better strategic IT planning. 
Top Takeaways on Better Strategic Planning for IT:
- A good plan is dependent on a clear understanding of IT assets, so a clear overview of infrastructure, applications, and how they enable the business’ capabilities is an important starting point.
- Ensure the IT strategy is aligned with the business goals through close collaboration with business leaders and key stakeholders.
- Have ongoing optimization built into the IT plan to ensure an effective digital backbone for the organization.
