Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy
Success depends on IT initiatives clearly aligned to business goals, IT excellence, and driving technology innovation.
Unlock This BlueprintBlueprint Contents:
1. Business-Aligned IT Strategy Deck – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to properly align with the business, achieve IT excellence, and drive technology innovation.
Align with the business by creating an IT strategy that documents the business context, key initiatives, and a strategic roadmap. To create a business-aligned IT strategy, you must understand what the business does and what the business will need. Only then can a carefully thought-out, strategic and tactical plan be created for execution.
This storyboard will help you build your IT mission and vision statements and IT guiding principles, elicit business context from the CIO and the IT team, identify your key initiatives and build their profiles, construct your strategic roadmap, and evaluate your governance structures, budget, and organizational changes.
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Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy – Phases 1-4
2. Business Context Interview Guide – An interview guide to help you elicit the business context by interviewing business leaders and peers.
Use this template as a starting point to interview your business leaders to elicit the business context. The goal of the interviews is to extract business goals, organizational priorities, and business initiatives that will play a critical role in building your IT strategy. Meet with your executive team and work with them to identify essential knowledge.
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Business Context Interview Guide
3. IT Presentation Template – A best-of-breed template to help you build a clear, concise, and compelling strategy document for stakeholders.
This presentation template uses sample data from "Acme Corp" to demonstrate an ideal IT strategy. Use this template to document your final strategy outputs including executive-facing business alignment and strategy highlights, key initiatives and summaries, strategic roadmap, budget proposal, IT goals and operating model, functional project roadmaps, and year-in-review data to highlight IT success stories.
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IT Strategy Presentation Template
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Strategy-on-a-Page Template
4. IT Strategy Workbook – A structured tool to help you prioritize IT strategy activities and build a roadmap to ensure success.
This tool guides an IT department in planning and prioritization activities to build an effective IT strategy. This Excel workbook guides you through making key decisions regarding the visuals that should be incorporated into your final presentation document. Key activities include building a goals cascade visual that shows the relationships between business and IT goals, initiatives, and capabilities; prioritizing key initiatives using a balanced scorecard approach; and building the IT strategy roadmap using a Gantt chart visual to showcase project execution timelines.
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IT Strategy Workbook
Your Challenge
IT strategies are often nonexistent or ineffective:
- 74.6% of organizations have an IT strategy process they feel is ineffective.
- IT does not do a good job of communicating its support for business goals; therefore, 23.6% of CXOs still feel that their goals are unsupported by IT.
IT departments that have not developed IT strategies experience alignment, organization, and prioritization issues.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- A CIO has three roles: enable business productivity, run an effective IT shop, and drive technology innovation. Your key initiative plan must reflect these three mandates and how IT strives to fulfill them.
- Don’t project your vision three to five years into the future. Dive deep on next year’s big-ticket items instead.
- Developing an IT strategy is a wasted effort if no mechanisms are put in place to govern the journey.
- If you don’t communicate it, it doesn’t exist; simple, appealing, and inspirational communication is needed.
Impact and Result
- Establish the scope of your IT strategy by defining IT’s mission and vision statements and guiding principles.
- Perform a retrospective of IT’s performance to recognize the current state while highlighting important strategic elements to address going forward.
- Elicit the business context and identify strategic initiatives that are most important to the organization while building a plan to execute on it.
- Evaluate the foundational elements of IT’s operational strategy that will be required to successfully execute on key initiatives.
- Wrap all strategic information into a highly visual and compelling presentation that enables easy customization and executive-facing content.
Member Testimonials
After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.
9.4/10
Overall Impact
$79,932
Average $ Saved
31
Average Days Saved
Client
Experience
Impact
$ Saved
Days Saved
VNGR Beverage
Guided Implementation
10/10
$34,250
10
Ross was great. He was patient with me and provided very meaningful feedback!
Alps Alpine North America, Inc.
Guided Implementation
9/10
$6,850
10
Allow more pauses for customer feedback/reply. Please remember not all customers need 100% details and information. Find a balance between you an... Read More
University Of Toronto
Workshop
10/10
N/A
26
Paul was Incredibly meticulous in his workshop and post workshop guidance. The Student Life IT team truly and fully appreciates all the effort that... Read More
CARDINIA SHIRE COUNCIL
Guided Implementation
10/10
$9,100
20
Great insights and advice, and mostly affirmation of the approach I am taking on several matters.
Texas Tech University System
Workshop
9/10
$12,330
5
Weather really disrupted our event. Despite the weather we managed to get a reasonable level of collaboration. Dennis was a fantastic facilitator.
Hackensack Meridian Health
Workshop
9/10
$65,075
14
Project prioritization was the best. Don't think I have anything negative to add.
Mahoning County
Workshop
10/10
$13,700
90
Working with knowledgeable analysts and tools that have proven results. I am relatively new to government IT leadership. Over the past year I have ... Read More
Platte River Power Authority
Workshop
10/10
$68,500
10
Being able to work with Chuck again was very helpful. We have done three of these together now and Chuck having the history with Platte River great... Read More
McLean County, IL
Workshop
9/10
$12,330
18
Best: The forced carve out of time to focus without distraction on the strategy Worst: 3 days online is always tough - was glad it wasn't 4. ... Read More
Bob Barker Company, Inc.
Guided Implementation
10/10
$13,700
10
Sidney is a great analyst and advisor. I appreciated his input, and he provided me with the confidence I needed to present my IT Strategy to the CF... Read More
Atmus Filtration Technologies Inc.
Guided Implementation
8/10
$13,700
5
Texas Bank & Trust Company
Guided Implementation
8/10
$8,220
6
NIGERIA LNG LIMITED
Workshop
9/10
$65,075
20
Excellent facilitation, listening skills and ability to accommodate diverse opinions while sharing best practices based on experience.
Mutual Benefit Group
Guided Implementation
10/10
$13,700
5
Toronto Port Authority
Workshop
9/10
N/A
N/A
Claudia was immensely helpful thought the workshop. She has guided the workshop in the right direction to get the best outcome from it.
LiveBetter
Guided Implementation
8/10
$6,370
7
The Info-Tech Blue Prints have a lot of useful content and effective methods of conveying important messages Ross was very helpful. His experienc... Read More
MAYOR AND CITY COUNCIL OF LAUREL
Guided Implementation
10/10
$13,700
50
Benoit provided great guidance and expertise in the creation and alignment of our IT Strategy, how to ensure that it received backing from leadersh... Read More
University of York
Workshop
7/10
$17,100
10
Chuck our facilitator was very good and knowledgeable. The slide deck produced after is very detailed and a sound foundation to develop our Strateg... Read More
WinCo Foods, LLC
Workshop
9/10
$137K
23
+ Very good overall. Areez did a great job facilitating the discussions. If found the exercise to be very valuable and so did the team. - This... Read More
Raytheon Systems Limited
Workshop
7/10
N/A
N/A
Areez is an excellent facilitator and was very flexible to our requirements. We did find the comparison between an in person and a remote workshop... Read More
State of Ohio - Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
Workshop
8/10
N/A
10
Dennis did a great job facilitating the workshop and keeping the flow going to get a valued outcome. I would remove the section regarding resources... Read More
Niagara Regional Police Service
Workshop
10/10
$10,000
50
Our experience has been excellent. Claudia did a an amazing job in facilitating the IT strategy workshop and brought a lot of practical and strateg... Read More
City of Peoria, AZ
Workshop
8/10
N/A
N/A
Chuck was very knowledgeable and had real world experience. Class was to the point, not a lot of fluff. I don't know if I'd classify anything as ... Read More
Intercity Transit
Guided Implementation
10/10
$34,250
100
The best parts of this project was Ross. Ross made this process so easy and seamless for me. His expertise and experience shined through. It was a ... Read More
EQUITY GROUP HOLDINGS PLC
Workshop
9/10
$65,000
10
The best part of the experience was the fact that there was very good coordination value template and the fact that the Dennis challenged and provi... Read More
Center For Creative Leadership
Workshop
9/10
$68,500
9
Best part: (a) Knowledgeable facilitator - Dennis provided timely advice and recommendations; also great insights from my CIO Counselor Carlos Tho... Read More
Sinclair Community College
Guided Implementation
10/10
$4,110
2
Sidney is always great to work with. This was a relatively short engagement, but Sidney was very helpful
Sundale
Guided Implementation
10/10
N/A
18
Benoit has been an absolute delight to work with. His depth of knowledge, breadth of experience, and considered approach to tackling challenging or... Read More
Crystal Flash Inc
Guided Implementation
10/10
N/A
5
I appreciated Ross's willingness to work at my pace, as well as his input and ability to assist in creating a cohesive and compelling business-driv... Read More
Vancouver Island University
Guided Implementation
10/10
$1,900
5
