IT Strategy

Your IT strategy will show the way to achieving an IT system that meets the needs of your business strategy while sensibly balancing out IT performance and costs. Key starting-points here are therefore the overall company strategy and requirements for future viability.

 

Challenges

Demands made by internal stakeholders, environmental influences and the current state of the company IT landscape are all important factors for the IT strategy and therefore need to be considered.

Business requirements

  • Management Board/shareholders
  • Management team, company divisions
  • Company and divisional strategies

Company environment

  • Market structure
  • Technological developments
  • Political developments
  • Demographic developments
  • Availability of resources

Current IT landscape

  • Historical IT strategy
  • Organisational and operational structure
  • Project portfolio
  • Architectures
  • Governance mechanisms
  • CIO and CIO organisation
  • IT organisation

Business users

  • Understanding requirements from business users
  • Nature of communication with business users / requirements management
  • IT marketing

Governance and organisation

  • Operational / organisational IT structure, operating model
  • Steering mechanisms
  • Security aspects

Service portfolio and development plan

  • Service catalogue
  • Application architecture and platform strategy
  • Technical infrastructure and standards

 

Perspectives

We identify action areas from a total of six different perspectives in order to ensure that no options are neglected:

Personnel

  • Workforce size
  • Know-how and skill profiles
  • Human resource development

Vertical integration / sourcing

  • Sourcing strategy
  • Optimising the existing situation
  • General conditions to be considered

Costs / performance

  • Best-practice cost position for IT service provisioning
  • Budgeting
  • IT success factors and value drivers from a company perspective

 

 

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Process

The formulation of a suitable IT strategy is completed in six separate phases. The cycle ends with a final review of orientation on business value, enabling statements to be made about the degree of implementation for the IT strategy.

1

Understanding the challenges

A common understanding of challenges forms the starting point for the strategy. To achieve this, the company and functional strategies are developed systematically while considering the factors as mentioned above.

2

Status quo analysis plus “What should we achieve?”

This is followed by an analysis of the situation to date, which also adds detail to challenges. At the end of this phase, the key question of “What should we achieve?” has been investigated from all angles.

3

“What can we achieve?” – developing an action plan

“What should we achieve?” becomes “What can we achieve?”. We work together to identify options and potential measures for meeting the challenges. Here, we consider personnel and skills, organisation and governance, the IT architecture and development, as well as costs and sourcing options.

4

Developing the vision, mission and target cluster

After evaluating all of the options, one main strategic line needs to be agreed: together, we then work to formulate a vision and mission, and identify a cluster of targets.

5

Deriving targets

We then use the strategic line chosen to derive targets that can be verified by indicators and measured values.

6

Action plans

As a final step, we then select and prioritise the measures. This selection is then used to draw up action plans, plan corresponding projects and brief their project managers.

Once the actions have been integrated into your short-, mid- and long-term budget planning, implementation can begin and is monitored continuously by the defined indicators.

Business value of IT strategy

To review the IT strategy, we recommend analysing the orientation on IT’s business value: this allows conclusions to be drawn about the degree of implementation for the current strategy.

Here, the business value of IT is defined by the support IT provides to the main categories of customers, business processes, organisation and resources. A detailed implementation analysis of strategy targets and business units uncovers weak points as well as potential opportunities for improvements: these can provide decisive cues for adapting the IT strategy to accommodate these new findings and developments.

 

We are also happy to offer workshops where we work together to identify the options and potential for your business in relation to IT strategies.

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