What is IT strategy?

Gartner defines IT Strategy quite well in their IT Glossary when they explain it as:

“IT strategy is the discipline that defines how IT will be used to help businesses win in their chosen business context”

As IT is becoming a more and more integrated part of most peoples’ lives, IT is also becoming a more and more important part of how “businesses win in their chosen business context”.

With most of our customers, we have seen how IT has changed from focusing mostly on stability and costs to also focus on fast development, flexibility, and offering cutting-edge digital services.

We believe that companies that are not able to handle both the IT cost/stability as well as IT development/innovation parameters will have a limited lifespan left. “Being disrupted” is a terrible and overhyped term, but it has already happened to many companies and it will happen to more in the future – and the speed will not slow down.

But let us start a bit more down to earth. In order to understand IT strategy, we must understand that the role of IT is basically to support business processes. This video explains it in a great and very simple way:

Where do you want to go with your IT strategy?

Strategy and IT strategy mean very different things for different companies and organisations. This is why we cannot give the perfect recipe on what an IT strategy should be.

However, we can say that the IT strategy is there to enable the organisation to succeed in their overall strategy. And the overall strategy process is all about finding out who you are as an organisation– and where you want to go. In this process, you also have to find out who you are not – and where you don’t want to go. The last part is especially true for IT, since there is so much hype and so many options.

This video from Duke University gives a great perspective on this, as well as why the lack of a clear IT strategy is an important reason why many IT projects fail.

IT is complex – so how do we reduce complexity?

With many customers, we see that implementing IT frameworks like ITIL, PRINCE2 etc. can lead to increased and unnecessary complexity when it is not sufficiently adapted to the actual needs of the organisation.

Let’s see what the founder of one of the world’s most valuable companies has to say about this:

Note Steve Jobs’ focus on culture and team work. His perspective is very well aligned with one of the most influential strategy speaker in recent years, Yves Morieux from Boston Consulting Group, that made this great speech on how to reduce complexity:

(You can click on “CC” to put on subtitles)

The reason why we have chosen these two more generic strategy presentations is that this is at the core of what we see happening in IT. Our most innovative customers are focusing heavily on Agile Development and DevOps and these two concepts are exactly about strengthening collaboration and reducing complexity.

Digital Transformation

The consumers of today require a seamless digital interaction with the companies they buy products and services from. It is not optional for companies to deliver this – it is simply needed if they want to survive in the competitive landscape of today, where the next vendor is only one click away from the consumer.

Therefore, digital transformation is needed, but this does not mean it is easy. The below video gives a great conceptual overview of what digital transformation is, and a simple overall framework on how to do it.

Shadow IT and Bimodal IT

You might think that the IT strategy is something that is first designed and then executed by “IT” and then the products and services are delivered to external customers or internal customers (“the business”).

However, it is not that simple. The people from “the business” are not aliens to IT and they often have great ideas of what could be done (and sometimes also very bad ideas).

But the world is often much more complex from the IT department’s point of view and therefore “the business” can feel they are met by a wall of bureaucracy when they come to IT with their needs and their ideas.

When this is the case, the consequence is often that “the business” just buys IT services themselves and start using them. With all the SaaS solutions now available, this is getting easier and easier. This is also referred to as “Shadow IT” and below, Jeanne Ross from MIT explains the concept well, and why you actually need to embrace this from a strategic point of view:

Another way of balancing the need for stability and the need for delivering fast-paced innovation to the business is called “bimodal IT” or “Two speed IT”. It brings up several challenges, but we have seen it work quite well for some of our customers. We also see an increasing trend to separate out entire parts of the organisation to cut it loose from all the governance and political processes that can be a true killer for speed and innovation.

Let’s round off with the concept of bimodal IT explained:

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