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.
9.5/10
Overall Impact
$90,340
Average $ Saved
34
Average Days Saved
Client
Experience
Impact
$ Saved
Days Saved
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
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.
Town of The Blue Mountains
Guided Implementation
9/10
$30,000
60
Everyone was great, many thanks to Manish and Sharan for being patient with me whenI wasn't able to work on it as much as I had liked.
State of Kansas Human Services
Workshop
10/10
$68,500
110
Western University of Health Sciences
Workshop
10/10
$1.37M
120
The potential impact and return on investment from this engagement is high. Both time and money will be saved as a result of strategic planning, go... Read More
Southern Ute Shared Services
Workshop
9/10
$68,500
10
Best - Customer Feedback; Facilitated discussions; Follow-up data and analysis; Focused time with my management and key individual contributors. ... Read More
Randolph Brooks Federal Credit Union
Workshop
10/10
$2,603
3
Best was Chuck French, he is an excellent facilitator and very knowledgeable with the toolset. Not sure there was a 'bad' portion but I will say t... Read More
Victrex Manufacturing Ltd
Workshop
10/10
$37,620
20
Inmar, Inc.
Workshop
10/10
$102K
16
Unity Homes, Inc
Guided Implementation
10/10
$17,500
20
I didn't have a 'worst' part of the service experience. I absolutely appreciate Ross' time, patience, and mentorship. I have been a leader for many... Read More
CENTREPORT LIMITED
Guided Implementation
10/10
$135K
60
I was really well supported and loved the experience