The art of alignment: IT Strategy

The digital ambitions of many organisations are high. And rightly so. Nowadays, you can hardly find a business process in which digitisation does not play a crucial role. Think of a bank's payment systems, an insurer's financial reports, the decisions issued by the tax authorities and a factory's supply chain. Without well-functioning IT systems, it becomes very difficult to keep up with the competition or meet regulatory obligations. Formulating a good IT strategy and implementing it successfully is the key to success for most organisations. 

In practice, this turns out to be easier said than done. Many different people are involved in both the preliminary phase and the roll-out of an IT initiative. Interests and images of the ideal solution vary. Step one is to realise a coherent strategy. This requires not only an understanding of technology, organisation and environment. The larger the organisation, the more diverse parties have to give their agreement. Arriving at a supported IT strategy is an art in itself. 

The second step is the concrete implementation of the projects resulting from this strategy. This is not an unimportant step, judging by the large number of projects and programmes that fail in implementation. What is the reason for this? Strategy formation is an activity in which we look to the future. In that outlined future, realism meets an ideal reality. A strategy not only defines a desired end point, it is often meant to inspire and forms a dot on the horizon. An ambitious goal for which we all want to go the extra mile. The feasibility of plans is sometimes lost sight of in the process. Excessive ambitions then lead to complex projects that simply demand too much of an organisation's change capacity. The number of projects can also be too large, leading to projects being started but not completed due to a lack of priority. 

To overcome this problem, numerous project methods have been developed. Think, for example, of Prince2, MSP and Portfolio Management. Very analytical procedures that should reduce the failure probability of projects. These can be useful starting points. Yet it is not wise to blindly rely on them. Managing projects and programmes is people work. 

A project usually does not get far without clear support from client with great influence in the organisation. Besides management decisions on what absolutely must be done, decisions are also needed on what must not be done. This requires managers to give clear and firm direction, but also to keep in touch with the reality of implementation practice. Ideally, this is a dialogue that combines top-down with bottom-up. A good business case can help, but is only a tool. It is ultimately about tuning between very different parties with diverging interests. The goal is to actually realise realistic projects that contribute sufficiently to the ambitious objectives underlying them. 

Conducting that dialogue successfully is an area of expertise of Strategy Alliance. We speak the language of the developer and the product owner as well as the IT architect, the CIO and senior management. Ideally, that dialogue extends from the initial development of an IT strategy to the completion of the final project resulting from it.