Question

Suppose that you are a member of a team assembled to examine needs and decide on an IT strategy of non-profit organization. What are the steps you will take in understanding the needs, the costs, alternatives and implementation?

Answer 1

The accountability and strength of your IT strategy can have an incredible impact on your organisation whether it is Profitable or Non Profit Organisation. Naturally, the effectiveness of this strategy will directly correlate with the level of success you enjoy during your tenure irrespective of the Type of Organisation

The Following are the 7 Steps of Effective IT Strategy

Step 1: Build a team

The team should comprise of committed and sound persons who must lead and drive the whole strategy from start to finish. This doesn’t mean that you do all the work. Put together a team of people who have a sense of ownership. You want absolutely everyone to buy into your strategy.

Step 2: Align with the business’ objectives

The classic approach is to be aligned with the business strategy. The team consists both part of the business and represent IT, so by definition, this process of alignment requires you to educate others and yourself to deep dive into the business.

Step 3: Draw up a proper plan

Create a plan that establishes the correct parameters and illustrates exactly what needs to happen during at least two, and ideally three years. Unfortunately, many enterprises create plans with a myopic one year view.

Taking a medium to long-term view will allow a true transformation to be planned and executed. Such large-scale changes always take more time and effort than anticipated so make this clear to your team.

Step 4: Align the architecture roadmap with the strategy

Having the IT strategy and architecture roadmap fully aligned is mandatory – it’s essential to have some clarity on the ‘wants, needs and givens.’ The architecture roadmap provides a ‘lens’ on these givens along with grounding on the current and future state.

Your architecture roadmap needs to provide a technical view of the maturity of the current applications and hardware infrastructure. It must highlight when this equipment reaches end-of-life – this is often the ‘forgotten cousin’ that nobody wants to discuss. Linking new business initiatives with the remediation of legacy apps and systems will provide the reality check you need to maintain the right balance for your IT strategy.

The best practice is to use an architecture roadmap as an ‘artifact’ to represent discussions between the IT group and the rest of the business.

Step 5: Make strategic choices

There will never be sufficient funds and resources to meet every demand regardless of the size of your enterprise. This is always a hard pill for the business partners to swallow and there will be strong push to over commit. Your role is to be clear about these limitations.

I’m sure that are moments where the business has clear business strategies and priorities, but frankly this is not the rule. Even the best-planned enterprises will have ‘ad hoc’ regulatory or strategic projects that emerge out of the planning timeframe.

Step 6: Realise the ‘business of IT’

Your IT strategy needs to provide a framework for how IT is to be managed. This is what I call the ‘business of IT’ and this framework includes ‘organisational architecture’ aspects such as structure, capability and competencies.

Step 7: Sign off

You are near the end but it is not over yet. A symbolic process is the engagement and communications using broad and targeted messages. To this end a comprehensive plan of sharing with executive bosses, peers and within the IT function is needed.

These steps are common in any IT strategy Planning so you can write these for Non Profitable organisations also.