Developing an IT strategy is crucial to maximizing your company’s use of technology to improve service delivery and achieve business goals.
However, integrating the latest technology solutions into your corporate procedures only guarantees profitability if there’s a comprehensive IT development strategy in place
Statistics show that 70% of senior IT leaders recognize technology as being vital to increasing revenue, customer satisfaction, and elevating strategic operations. However, these objectives can only be attained if your IT can align with your business strategy
In this article, we will discuss how to develop an IT strategy, why having one is vital, and the benefits they bring.
What is an IT Strategy?
An IT strategy is a comprehensive plan that defines how your business should utilize technology to achieve its corporate goals.
In other words, it outlines how IT supports your business objectives and the factors influencing your company’s technology investment. Ideally, your IT strategy should include the following:
- Project timelines
- IT vision statement
- Project costs and budget
- Strategy coverage period
- Future IT operating models
- IT re-engineering processes
- IT staffing strategy and structure
- Project resources (human and structural)
- Adoption methods, tools, and frameworks
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How to Develop an IT Strategy for Your Business: Crucial Steps for IT Planning Success
A suitable IT strategy requires extensive planning to guarantee success. Without concrete functions guiding the development of your IT roadmap, you’ll likely end up with a hit-and-miss plan that falls short of required objectives.
Having established that, here’s how to develop an IT strategy for your organization
1. Align Your IT Strategy with Your Business Objectives
Technology aims to improve your business, and there’s empirical evidence that implementing digital technologies can accelerate progress toward business goals by 22%.
However, to improve your operations, your technology must align with your business’s processes and objectives.
The alignment process begins by meeting with your IT team and other departments to evaluate your business goals and identify the tech needed to deliver these objectives.
During this meeting, you should consider your overall organizational objectives, including your long-term goals.
2. Involve the Right People
A crucial part of developing your IT plan is involving the right professionals to guarantee success. Some key individuals to include in your IT strategy preparation include:
- A financial analyst
- IT department heads
- Chief Data Officer (CDO)
- IT engineers and architects
- Senior management executive
Besides your information technology and senior management teams, it’s also best to consider hiring a third-party IT consultant or managed service provider to oversee the process.
3. Define Success Metrics
Identifying your IT strategy’s success metrics will help you evaluate its performance throughout its lifetime and make necessary changes.
Some key metrics your IT strategy can be built on include
- Budget management for IT implementation
- Timely and cost-effective execution of business goals using IT systems
- Timely adoption of the latest systems to improve day-to-day processes and customer experience
Top 3 Benefits of Developing an IT Strategy for Your Business
An IT strategy for business serves as a roadmap to guide your company on maximizing ROI for technology across all spheres of the firm.
If profitability is at the core of your business objectives, here are the top three reasons why you need a strategic plan for your company’s IT.
1. Competitive Advantage
Technology continues to grow and improve at a rapid rate. Statistics show that there will be 75 billion connected devices worldwide by 2025.
Forecasts also show emerging tech will experience a 104% growth rate between 2018 and 2023.
Technology’s rapid growth means businesses need a strategy plan to keep up with key technology trends and identify the latest relevant tools that can guarantee improved service delivery.
Developing an IT strategy can help your company spot innovations early and adopt them before your competitors, giving you a potentially significant edge business-wise.
2. Budgeting and Financial Planning
Digital transformation is an expensive venture that can have a significant financial impact on your business.
Incorporating new hardware and software without an IT strategy eventually results in investing money in tech systems that fall short of your long-term goals or overall business strategy.
On the other hand, creating an IT strategy will enable you to achieve cost-effective tech utilization. You can determine what technology solutions are relevant to your day-to-day operations and the implementation budget for these systems.
3. Identify Duplicate Systems
Today’s businesses leverage multiple tech infrastructures. With several systems in operation at a company, it’s possible to have different tools executing the same tasks.
Such duplicate systems, which include hardware, software, and applications, can cost your business significant financial resources and personnel to operate and maintain.
Executing a strategic planning process for IT helps you to identify and eliminate unnecessary or redundant systems in your current tech infrastructure.
Your IT strategy will also involve a gap analysis to identify and upgrade tools falling short of your business objectives. Additionally, your strategy can be modified to include upgrades and replacement of these tools.
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Achieve Your Business Goals With Expert IT Development Strategy Consulting
Developing an IT strategy can help your firm identify and budget for the right tech for better organizational operations.
However, it’s a procedure that requires a high level of hands-on experience. Therefore, it’s best to outsource the process to a managed service provider.
The Isidore Group provides custom, budget-friendly, and enterprise-level managed IT solutions for SMBs provided by seasoned consultants, vCIOs and vCTOs
Throughout our eight years in business, we’ve leveraged our extensive experience and cutting-edge technology to build solutions that improve business services and deliver measurable results for our clients.
Get on the fast track to developing your IT strategy by contacting us today for strategy planning tailored to elevate your day-to-day operations.
