IT Service Week

In the April 2008 edition of Harvard Business Review, David J. Collis and Michael G. Rukstad, wrote an 11-page article entitled “Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?” While the article specifically focuses on business strategy and decisions that the CEO makes to give the enterprise an overall strategy, some of the concepts could be applied to IT Strategy for an enterprise’s technology department.

“Most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. If they can’t, neither can anyone else,” states the article and follows as their main argument. The article then compares how the CEO of Edward Jones, a St. Louis based Brokerage, uses a simple strategy that all 37,000 employees can understand and articulate to their customers. By using a simple strategy that is under 35 words in length the company has grown to become the fourth largest brokerage firm in the United States and they are on the Fortune’s list of top companies to work for in 2008.

Some of the problems are:

• Mixed Direction from Executive Management
• Customers are frustrated with company not clearly defining their purpose statement
• Should we not cut the price to maintain our strong brand image at the risk of losing the customer

I found these problems resemble many of the same issues the CIO faces when developing an IT Strategy. Often IT Strategies are loosely based on best practices such as ITIL but are too complex for every IT employee to understand and articulate to their customers, the business.

Often IT Strategies are complied of things such as we desire high availability, low total cost of ownership, or being on the forefront of technological systems. With 3-4 different strategies rolled into one canvas, employees from the help desk to the server rack are sent in multiple avenues of direction and are not as productive as expected.

This strategy begins by building a simple purpose statement. If a strategy has a disorganized purpose statement or something so complex that not all of your employees can understand the mission, then it would not matter if you had an IT budget the size of the US Fiscal budget; your strategy will fail.

Strategy begins in each Department

But building an IT Strategy can also take place at the departmental level. Of course, IT may have an overall strategy to supporting the business, it helps to define exactly how each IT unit aligns it’s services to the business. The similarity would be, “Our company provides consumers with low-cost bicycles and high quality customer service.” as the Company Strategy and then the marketing department would have their own strategy, “Our marketing department provides the business with a positive brand image demonstrating our exceptionally skilled customer service staff and low-cost in the marketplace.” You notice that the marketing department strategy aligns with the business strategy. Then further within the marketing department they have a research team that provides market research on the pricing of bicycles sold in the United States by competitors. This department would have a strategy as such, “To provide accurate reflection and research to the business that maintains our brand image of being a low-cost provider of bicycles.” Again, the statement is kept simple but also aligns itself to the company strategy.

Building an IT Purpose Statement

When it comes time to develop a strategy statement, compile a list of what are the most important purposes that IT serves for the business that you are supporting. After you have compiled the list, cut the list down to the three main purposes and these will make up your reason the business NEEDS technology to accomplish it’s business goals.

For our example we are going to use an e-commerce company that sells bicycles online.

Company Statement: “Provide a low-cost bicycle to budget cautious consumers.”

IT Operations Department: “Monitor, maintain, and supply high availability for the high volume of low-cost bicycle sales by our business.”

Everyone in the department should fully understand the strategy and be able to articulate the strategy to their customers in the business. This is where internal branding comes in and can help get your message out to the business users.

With a clear purpose statement, your department will be on the first step to developing a strong strategy that can
better support the business.

Tags: Align IT with the Business, Corporate Strategy, IT Strategy

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 6:16 pm and is filed under ITSM General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.