IT Strategic Planning
In today's organisations, ICT is used across organisations to support, enable or enhance business processes. A good IT Strategic Plan sets the program of work for IT for a period of time (typically between 3 and 5 years) and provides input to the Corporate Plan for the next financial year.
The Plan must be targeted at an executive audience and its delivery will typically consist of the IT Strategic Plan document and a supporting Executive Presentation. The content of the IT Strategic Plan is formulated to respond to the business, technical and regulatory drivers that impact the organisation's use of ICT, and in turn will impact the various operational plans that govern the day-to-day management of ICT across the organisation.
At SMS IT Strategic Planning focuses on assisting our clients to:
- Understand the expectations and imperatives of business and external stakeholders for the use of Information & Communications Technology (ICT) within the organisation
- To identify the current business and ICT factors that will either assist or constrain the organisation from meeting stakeholder expectations; and
- To develop an ICT Strategic Plan that describes the corporate or business unit agenda for use of ICT over the longer term
More specifically, the IT Strategic Planning process includes consideration of:
- The main internal and external drivers that influence the organisation's use of ICT
- The alignment of the organisation's current use of ICT with its business needs and strategy
- How the organisation's use of ICT compares to other similar organisations (best practice, industry trends and benchmarking)
- The key strategic objectives of the organisation over the next several years that require the use of ICT as an enabler
- How those strategic objectives will be achieved
- How the organisation makes decisions about what IT investments are to be made (IT Governance)
- What does the end state for the IT environment look like (Enterprise Architecture)
- How the performance of IT should be measured (Performance Measurement)
- The most appropriate strategy for handling the various IT Assets that the organisation has (ICT Asset Management)
- How the delivery of ICT assets is organised and executed (Programme, Portfolio & Project Management)
- All of these items may be included within an IT Strategic Plan according to the specific needs and established practices of the client.