Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy

Success depends on IT initiatives clearly aligned to business goals, IT excellence, and driving technology innovation.

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Blueprint 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • IT Strategy Presentation Template
  • 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.

  • IT Strategy Workbook
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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.
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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.

9.5/10


Overall Impact

$88,997


Average $ Saved

33


Average Days Saved

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

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

MASC

Workshop

8/10

$60,000

20

Denis Goulet is a great facilitator and we really enjoyed his guidance during this workshop. From the material that infotech provides to the flow... Read More

City of Scottsdale, Arizona

Workshop

10/10

$685K

60

I want to express my appreciation for the outstanding workshop facilitated by Asia Nebesnaia, our Analyst and Workshop Director and acknowledge the... Read More

Orange County Government

Workshop

9/10

$68,500

120

County of Fairfax

Workshop

10/10

$82,200

10

This process well defined better than prior year. Staff said they that this was far better, and Areez was engaged with team. Totally different expe... Read More

City of Livermore

Workshop

10/10

N/A

20

Curaleaf, Inc.

Workshop

10/10

$41,100

44

CCTS

Guided Implementation

10/10

$50,000

50

So far all good. The analyst was very knowledgeable and cooperative.

Louisiana State Employees’ Retirement System

Guided Implementation

10/10

$34,250

20

Manish is exceptionally knowledgeable, professional, and attentive. He comprehends the complexities involved in developing and executing strategic ... Read More

Tohono O’Odham Gaming Enterprise dba Desert Diamond Casinos

Workshop

8/10

$68,500

23

Strides Toronto

Guided Implementation

10/10

$11,500

20

Best services Anubhav provided. Very knowledgeable and knows subject very well. Timely advice.

University Of Alaska

Guided Implementation

10/10

$137K

120

Ben is the best InfoTech analyst I've worked with to date. I appreciate is candor, sense of humor and his expertise. Thanks.

Caribbean Utilities Company , Ltd.

Workshop

10/10

$41,100

10

The Info-Tech team provided valuable knowledge and insight, making the process seamless.

The McKnight Foundation

Workshop

10/10

$30,140

50

The best part was working with Ross and Info-Tech team. Having an expert point of view from people outside of our Organization allowed us to both t... Read More

Alexander T. Augusta Military Medical Center

Workshop

10/10

$12,330

10

The step-by-step guidance through the creation of the product were invaluable to my team and I. Not only the end product as a tool for planning for... Read More

AC Transit

Workshop

10/10

$137K

90

It was one of the best workshops I have attended on the topic of IT Strategy. It was engaging, fruitful, focused, and effective.

City of Atlanta / Atlanta Information Management (AIM)

Workshop

9/10

$685K

32

The best part of the experience was the instructor's ability to facilitate and prioritize everyone's time to ensure the objectives were met. The wo... Read More

Champaign Residential Services Inc

Guided Implementation

10/10

$8,220

5

Thank you for all of your help Ross. You took a very complex process and broke it down into digestible chunks that were easy to understand.

St. Lukes Health System Ltd.

Workshop

9/10

$13,700

10

The overall experience was excellent, and Denis did an outstanding job facilitating and adapting the workshop to our needs.

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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.

Guided Implementations

This guided implementation is an eight call advisory process.

Guided Implementation #1 - Pre-Project Call
Call #1 - Discuss business context and customize your organization’s capability map.
Guided Implementation #2 - Establish the scope of your IT strategy
Call #1 - Identify mission and vision statements and guiding principles to discuss strategy scope.
Guided Implementation #3 - Review performance from last fiscal year
Call #1 - Assess year-in-review data and evaluate performance.
Call #2 - Discuss diagnostic data results and success stories.
Guided Implementation #4 - Build your key initiative plan
Call #1 - Identify strategic initiatives and required information.
Call #2 - Discuss how to build your roadmap.
Guided Implementation #5 - Define your operational strategy
Call #1 - Discuss and identify appropriate operational strategy components.
Call #2 - Summarize results and plan next steps.