Build a Strategy to Modernize Your Infrastructure

Ensuring IT infrastructure keeps pace with constant technological change is not just a technical challenge but a strategic imperative – falling behind will leave your organization unable to capitalize on evolving opportunities. Info-Tech offers a structured framework for drawing up an infrastructure modernization strategy that empowers IT leaders, prioritizes investments, and ensures IT remains a catalyst for growth, innovation, and operational excellence.

IT infrastructure modernization must be approached as a wide-ranging transformation, touching on many aspects of IT, such as storage, telecommunications, and networks. In its way stand barriers such as technical debt, outdated processes, skills and talent shortages, budgetary constraints, and change-resistant organizational cultures. Your modernization strategy must have the right vision, mission, drivers, and goals, as well as guiding principles and strategic initiatives, to overcome these challenges and support a future-focused IT infrastructure aligned to organizational goals.

1. Think future state first.

When considering modernization, many organizations overfocus on their system’s current state when performing gap analysis, causing them to lose sight of the long term and pass up opportunities for innovation and transformation. An approach that puts the future state first enables a bolder vision that considers current state constraints without being held back by them.

2. Become a strategic enabler.

Infrastructure modernization requires a shift away from traditional management to a more strategic view that integrates people, processes, and technology to drive agility, innovation, and operational excellence. This approach requires I&O teams to understand overall business goals, align IT goals with them, and develop guiding principles that ensure IT delivers for customers.

3. Future-proof your infrastructure.

Successful modernization strategies keep an eye on the future. IT leaders must proactively plan for future needs by investing in scalable, flexible infrastructure such as cloud services, automation, and AI technologies, while continuously upskilling IT teams, to ensure infrastructure and staff remain future-ready.

Use this structured framework to build a future-focused infrastructure modernization strategy

Our research includes four-phase guidance, comprehensive templates, and a detailed workbook designed to shepherd you through each stage of setting out your infrastructure modernization strategy. Use this step-by-step approach to build a flexible framework for a strategy that addresses your current and future needs and enables ongoing decision-making.

Align business and IT goals by envisioning your ideal future state and drawing up mission and vision statements, including an understanding of customer needs.

Determine your direction by defining strategy drivers, identifying guiding principles, and conducting a future state analysis.

Map a path forward by identifying strategic objectives, anticipate what your strategy will affect, and understand and mitigate your constraints.

Craft your message by prioritizing strategic objectives and creating standards and high-level outlines of strategy-aligned initiatives.

Build a Strategy to Modernize Your Infrastructure Research & Tools

1. Build a Strategy to Modernize Your Infrastructure Deck – A step-by-step framework for developing the strategic approach and mindset that will fuel your modernization initiatives.

This deck will guide you through the steps of building a strategy by delivering a mission and vision, drivers, and guiding principles that will ensure you are successful in your modernization efforts.

Understand the challenges, obstacles, and opportunities of modernizing infrastructure, such as cloud computing, software-defined networking, edge computing, hyperconverged infrastructures, and unified communications.
Leverage Info-Tech’s step-by-step methodology, thought model, and templates to build out a framework for your modernization strategy.
Uncover actionable insights that ensure your modernization strategy is well-defined and future-focused.

2. IT Infrastructure Modernization Strategy Report Template – A valuable template intended to get management on board with your proposed strategy.

Use this template to organize the work you have completed in the blueprint and present it to your organization’s IT leaders to build consensus on next steps.

Document the decisions you’ve made thus far, including your vision and mission.
Explicitly relate your proposed strategy to your organization’s overall strategy and goals.
Present your findings and maximize your chances of obtaining formal sign-off from management.

3. IT Infrastructure Modernization Strategy Presentation Template – A high-level executive presentation optimized for the boardroom.

Use this fully customizable deck to communicate your planned strategy to the highest levels of organizational leadership.

Set out your mission, vision, goals, and guiding principles.
Create initiative profiles for each high-priority initiative in your strategy.
Map your initiatives to specific organizational goals.

4. Future State, Constraints, and Mitigation Workbook – An easy-to-use workbook that defines the constraints associated with your strategy and future vision.

Use this Excel tool to take a granular approach to relating the individual parts of your modernization strategy to your desired future state and identifying and mitigating their constraints.

Choose your focus areas and match each to your desired future vision.
Capture and assess the impact, likelihood, and priority of each constraint.
Establish a mitigation strategy for each constraint, including timelines and responsible actors.

Build a Strategy to Modernize Your Infrastructure visualization

Align your business and IT goals, then define your guiding principles to set direction.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

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