Question

Telecommunication Governance 1:

Note:Very Important to add at least 4 bibliographical sources.

Explain in detail, illustrate examples and applications:

What are the good IT Strategic guiding principles and give at least three examples of indicators of a bad IT strategy.

Answer 1

Align IT to Business

Most traditional strategic planning exercises recommend crafting a vision, mission statement, objectives, goals or all of the above. You don’t need to overdo documenting this or the specific wording, but it is vitally important to ground your plan in a clear idea of the role IT plays in supporting larger business goals. By getting the entire leadership team on side with these objectives, you establish a touchstone for all other decisions.

Work Quickly

Traditional strategic IT plans take three to four months to draft. These days, that’s just too long. Aim for four to six weeks, or even less, but expect to revisit your plan every six months to a year. You may not have all the answers, but you can at least identify the most important questions and make a plan to learn more.

Mind the Gaps

A gap analysis, or a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), will form a crucial piece of your IT strategy. What works, what doesn’t, and what could limit your business plans one, three or even five years down the road? Evaluate every aspect of IT in your business, including the operations, planning and procedures, and consider how it could change to better support business goals.

Set Goals

The act of documenting IT plans, with specific time frames for when initiatives or investments should occur, helps you line up all the pieces and identify prerequisites for success. Will everything go precisely according to plan? Almost certainly not. But with milestones put in place, your organization can keep pushing forward.

Stay Flexible

Business conditions will change. New demands will arise. And yes, technology capabilities will evolve, especially over five years. But with a plan in place, you have a better opportunity to assess progress, and update it to reflect new conditions. Course corrections are inevitable, even worthwhile.

Five Signs of Bad Strategy

A Good Strategy is abstract enough to develop further, but detail enough to guide through.

The leading executive has chosen a goal and called it a strategy. Most of the times the so-called "strategy" document only gives the goals objectives but does not state the roadmap or path to achieve the goal. The executive team needs to provide vision to the staff and then share the differentiating recipe for how their strategic approach will accomplish "goals" that exceed those of their competitors. Simply stating the goals with no indication of how to accomplish them (strategy and tactics) does not rally the troops. Indeed, it's actually the "non-strategy" approach of stratospheric statements that are too lofty for the average employee to connect with and understand how they can contribute to achieving the goal.

Jumping from mission formulation to strategy development without sufficient time to determine the critical success indicators embodied in the mission statement. Or management rejects the formal planning mechanism and make intuitive decisions that may conflict with the formal plan. Or the management is becoming so engrossed in current problems that insufficient time is spent on long-range planning. This also creates confusion for other employees on how the plan is to be deployed in their work activities

Jumping from mission formulation to strategy development without sufficient time to determine the critical success indicators embodied in the mission statement. Or management rejects the formal planning mechanism and make intuitive decisions that may conflict with the formal plan. Or the management is becoming so engrossed in current problems that insufficient time is spent on long-range planning. This also creates confusion for other employees on how the plan is to be deployed in their work activities

Many times the strategy storyboard is written and approved but without a solid commitment to overcome both in internal and external challenges. It is usually the internal challenges that are hidden, and executives may not be aware of the demand for the challenges as well during execution. The strategy is nothing but the answer to the question where the resources should be allocated to get the max leverage for the advancement. This resource allocation (Focus, time, money and people) commitment will be fuzzy till the key challenges are understood and agreed upon.

something quite different and not an integral part of the entire management process. Top management believes that it can create a plan by delegating the planning function to a "planner." While the planner may facilitate the planning process, management must still take ownership of the plan itself. Otherwise, they will fail to use the plans as a standard for measuring performance

Top management fails to communicate the plan to the other employees, who continue working in the dark. Fail to involve key employees in all phases of the planning process (preparation, strategy development, evaluation, and implementation). Or the planning is becoming so formal that the process lacks the flexibility and creativity needed to address the uniqueness of each company. To put simply, fail to create a climate which is collaborative and not resistant to change.

There're no such absolute criteria to differentiate good strategy and bad strategy; the right strategy should be ambitious enough to inspire organization up to the next level, and practical enough to execute it with confidence.

The examples of indicators of a bad IT strategy :

1. If you are not facing any failures or problems then it means that it is not going in the right way.

2. If the goal cannot be reached even after the last push then it indicates a bad IT strategy.

3. Complex strategies or goals are not the best ideas.