IT Strategy - Time to think

  by Charles Rattray | 04 Aug 2008 | Permalink | IT Management

In the world of IT management, strategy is important. Constantly changing circumstances requires iterative thinking to address the vision, objectives, capabilities and culture of the organisation. An emphasis on process and feedback mechanism, often dictates that the ‘doing’ of IT strategy is a mechanical process, procedural and quite possibly driven by supporting tools. However, there are many decisions and choices to be made in strategic IT management – but do we have time for it.

Each tactical and strategic choice and decision adds to the endless combination of actions and reactions possible. Not taking the time to analyse and think through all the possibilities seems fool hardy. Not taking the time to fully understand an IT environment, its resources, assets, and current internal standing while failing to measure IT capability against the organisation’s future plans seems equally fool hardy. Having time to think is not only important, but is a necessary first step to IT strategic thinking and in making IT effective.

The business world that much of IT underpins is always reacting to global forces. Consider the impact of technology, globalisation, new markets, fresh innovation, and of course the fashion for continuous flexibility. It quickly becomes apparent that having time to think is not only important, but again is a necessary first step to strategic thinking.

Thomas Friedman talked about the triple convergence in his book, ‘The World is Flat’. Giving people access to raw information via web search, the ability to communicate globally in real time, and the ability for anyone to create innovation solutions from anywhere, delivered anywhere, means that even in the lowly world of the IT department, strategy takes on a new significance.

For the IT executive team to understand the external forces acting on a business, and to recognise the relevance of today’s IT resources to its market position, it is likely to need more than a deep knowledge of the business, the product(s), and the organisation’s current strengths and weaknesses. It will also take deep thinking, developed over time and refined during the course of successive actions. Thinking which is aimed at creating competitive advantage, when global change is happening rapidly, doesn’t allow time for consideration of every example and case study to see what can be learnt from them. Instead, thinking strategically, and spending time doing it, requires time to ponder the ‘big picture’ knowing that all the facts about the IT department and its operations are readily available when needed. These constantly updated facts should include a deep knowledge of current talent, capabilities and core competencies, and include an in depth knowledge of all the IT resources available. This latter knowledge should cover the current business services supported by the IT team, their dependencies and relationships together with enough depth of knowledge to support strategic decision making. For most IT departments there is no time to fact find and much less time to think about the detail in a useful way. They are too busy trying t keep up with the current chosen direction.

Looking at the story of Google, a company whose search engine product pushed aside house hold names such as Alta Vista and Yahoo, Google adopted a completely new approach to both search, and ranking query results. Google also adopted a different business model for revenue generation based on advertising. It is easy with hindsight to be critical of Google’s competitors during the company’s early years, but perhaps they simply fell victim to not spending enough time thinking strategically about how to deal with a new way of doing business. As history states, Google’s strategy, whether it was superior or not, worked because competitors were thinking with clearly defined sets of assumptions about their own companies and the market they operated in. Competitors did not have the luxury of creating a fresh new business. They believed that they had to work with their existing resources and pre-conceived knowledge about how their businesses operate.

Now apply that message to IT departments.

Monitoring success and taking corrective action both require a definition of what that success looks like, and a determination of where the IT organisation wants to be – that requires thought. From these two attributes decisions can be made about how to get to where the organisation wants to go and what the best course of IT action is going to be. Measured progress and scorecards then provide further input to the thought and decision processes which determine next steps in this perpetually temporary strategy. Strategy then becomes a mix of proactive actions and reactions to unanticipated business decisions and market forces. Proactive actions can be planned, budgeted for and assessed for effectiveness. The more time spent thinking about which proactive actions will have the best outcome using the known IT resources and technology, the less time will be needed on financially painful unanticipated events. Similarly, IT departments don’t provide the best service they can to their organisation by adopting imitative strategies. Neither do lucky breaks come to IT teams who have not done the preparation and advanced knowledge building ground work.

Everyone in the IT organisation should input to the strategy thought process. The executive IT team take care of the big-picture thinking, but collaborative thinking is one way to ensure thinking time in the company is effective and done efficiently. More to the point, thinking time should be aligned to the strategic issues and decisions the IT organisation faces. The IT executive team should spend time thinking about the higher level decisions, while the organisation’s technology experts should at least devote some energy to the micro-level strategy. For both groups, they will need to understand IT strengths and weaknesses as well as all of the IT assets under their remit. Relationship and dependency mapping for all the business services support by the IT organisation should be known and understood in detail. A visualisation of IT is required, and of course the more automated the creation of those visualisations is, the more time there will be for strategic thinking and planning.

While strategy theory often suggests organisations should only employ the best employees in their industry this is not always practical or achievable. The talent an IT organisation holds on to becomes an integral component of successful strategy execution, but buying and keeping talent becomes a major headache. The knowledge and enthusiasm of key employees can be tapped to generate innovation in support of operational excellence, but do even the best employees always have all the knowledge they need? ‘Thinking’ is a powerful mechanism for creating and delivering products and services, and we could conclude that if thinking is so important to the successful operation of a company, it must also be key to developing, implementing and assessing the organisation’s IT strategy. A strategy which is only as good as the knowldge the organisation’s people had available to work with.

The act of thinking in the right way does seem to be an essential ingredient to strategic management. Many argue that strategic thinking occurs before strategic planning – the former enables the latter – and that strategic thinking occurs at two levels, the corporate level and the individual level. Both levels become interrelated and interdependent. From this it seems clear that the available data a business has about its IT environment needs to be analysed through thought rather than just managed through process, and that without such thought, the creative ability of an organisation to build a winning IT strategy will be absent.

When time is made for strategic thinking and subsequent planning that thinking needs to be shared with others in the IT team. Technology groups within an organisation often have a stubborn independence from each other, but by creating a common language for strategic thinking and discussion, all teams can quickly get to the same page as far as decisions and reactions are concerned. Application dependency mapping is one simple and rapid way to ensure that all of the organisation’s IT teams can think and talk about their IT assets in the same way.

In summary, time is in short supply, and there is often no time to think. However, by adopting a strategic approach to building IT functions as supply chains to business processes, thinking can focus on understanding what is relevant knowledge about the IT organisation, understanding competitors’ IT strategy, and achieving competitive advantage. Mixing time spent ‘thinking’ with time spent ‘doing’ and analysing the results means that thinking time becomes more effective, more productive and more rewarding. ‘Thinking’ is therefore no luxury, but instead is a necessary and integral part of designing, planning, and executing a continually evolving IT strategy. Creative thought and the invention of new innovation to support strategy can only happen successfully if time is set aside for thought. Automated application dependency mapping gives back time to IT employees to begin strategic thinking using a common language while providing the big picture view on which strategy will be realised and executed.