Why Developing an IT Strategy is Critical

The problem of non-strategic IT spending is an issue for small businesses, but as companies grow, the challenges of effectively managing their IT budget increase rapidly.

“Rapid growth often forces many small businesses to completely overhaul their IT strategies,” explains Jeremy Wanamaker, CEO for Complete Network. “However, the main challenge with developing an IT strategy is ensuring you can do so without exceeding your budget.”

But how exactly do you allocate budget to keep existing systems functional while also ensuring you’re embracing the newest technologies on a proactive basis?

That exact question keeps the leaders at businesses across the country up at night, but it doesn’t have to. In this article, we’ll give you a leg up on understanding IT strategy and how you can develop one at your business.

What is an IT Strategy and Why is it Necessary?

An IT strategy is a long-term, comprehensive plan that explains how your organization will manage its technology.

By gathering input from stakeholders from across your organization and then centralizing this plan in a written document, your business achieves a few important goals, which include:

• Future-Ready Technology
  By aligning your business goals with your IT, a documented IT strategy helps ensure that your team always has the tool it needs to stay ahead of the competition and work with maximum efficiency. This is especially important, given that 70% of businesses either have a digital transformation strategy or are actively working on one.
• Streamlined Budgeting
  By planning for the replacement of end-of-life (EOL) hardware, major network upgrades, and other network projects in advance, decision makers can anticipate large project expenditures by months or even years, dramatically reducing sudden IT expenses.
• More Reliable IT
  Without a coherent, overarching strategy for IT, companies often create “gaps” in their systems, where incompatibility, poor integration, and cybersecurity threats, especially for small businesses, can easily flourish. Conversely, taking the time to formulate a comprehensive IT strategy means a network with less downtime and is more resilient to infiltration.

When is a business strategy necessary? Despite what many business leaders may feel, a business of any size can benefit from having a robust IT strategy.

For example, even small businesses with 10 employees may find that the strategic deployment of technology can help them streamline business processes, achieve key metrics, and accomplish their business goals faster than they would otherwise.

That said, studies show that while 67% of business leaders believe their companies are good at crafting strategies, 47% stated that they’re better at implementing them. Additionally, having a robust strategy increases a business’s likelihood of implementing new technologies.

What Your IT Strategy for Business Should Include

Now that you know what an IT strategy is and its importance, the next logical question is: how do I build my IT strategy, and what exactly should I include in it?

Here is a general overview of some of the most important elements.

• Comprehensive IT Audit
  You can’t effectively plan without knowing what defines your starting point. Therefore, the first step in building an impactful strategy is to establish a baseline for your network through a thorough IT audit.
  The audit includes many elements, such as a record of all the devices attached to your network, a thorough test of each system, a review of your network analytics, and an evaluation of your security controls.
  The audit helps you establish a baseline for your network health and performance, allowing you to track the impact of changes and pave the way for systematic, incremental improvements.
• IT Roadmap
  One of the primary goals of any IT strategy is to achieve what is known as “business-IT alignment,” which essentially means that you have the right technology – configured in the right way – to support the way that your team works.
  Achieving this alignment is more difficult than it sounds, considering that both your business goals and your IT can change from month to month.
  The IT roadmap is a document that lays out upgrades and changes to help support your team’s productivity, which you adjust as priorities change to keep stakeholders on the same page.

Because the process of IT strategy development has lots of detailed, moving parts, which can make it confusing for businesses that lack internal technology experts to help them navigate the process, it may be helpful to enlist the help of a virtual chief information officer (vCIO).

Source: McKinsey

Important Steps for Developing an IT Strategy

The process of developing an IT strategy involves several discrete steps. Here are some of the most important steps:

Gather Information From Stakeholders

Your strategy can’t be a siloed effort performed just by your IT department, it must organically reflect the opinions and needs of your entire organization. At the start of any IT strategy project, organize a team of stakeholders from each department and communicate their importance.

A McKinsey survey showed that 70% of business executives were not satisfied with their company’s strategies, while a further 70% did not trust the results of the strategy development process. This further highlights the importance of getting the support of your stakeholders.

Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

How do you define technology success? Without a clear sense of what victory looks like, you won’t know when you’re managing your technology effectively or when you’re not.

Common KPIs include device availability, network latency, network utilization, and others which you can read about here.

Gap Analysis

What technologies are missing from your ideal state? Performing a gap analysis helps you answer that question and identify the steps you’ll need to take to bring your network to optimal performance.

A full gap analysis should cover not just network performance but also cybersecurity and regulatory compliance.

Identify Key Technology Trends

What new technologies are driving increased efficiency and customer satisfaction in your industry? Baking those elements into your strategy is an important way to keep yourself ahead of the curve and the competition.

How to Develop an IT Strategy for Long-Term Success

The point of an IT strategy is to help you achieve stability and optimal efficiency over the long term. Here are some of the steps that you can take to make sure that’s the case.

Maintain the Strategy

A common mistake that businesses make is to take the time and expense of developing a comprehensive IT strategy, then put it on a shelf and see it as a finished product.

Research shows that 7.5% of IT strategy potential is lost due to not having the correct resources available in the right place at the right time.

The opposite is true: you must treat your IT strategy as a living document and make plans to revisit it at least twice a year to ensure that it reflects your goals and priorities.

This is especially true in the realm of cybersecurity, as new threats and forms of malware can force businesses to pivot rapidly to stay ahead of the latest hacks.

Get Expert Advice

Most small and mid-sized businesses simply lack the internal IT expertise to develop and maintain an effective IT strategy.

The reason can vary by organization. Small, overstressed IT teams may be too busy putting out daily technology fires to manage a long-term vision for IT success.

In other situations, there is simply no senior IT staff in-house with the skills necessary to achieve a big-picture strategy for an organization’s technology.

When the right in-house talent is absent, the best strategy is to work with a trusted externally managed IT services partner, who can provide the expertise you need, without the need for an expensive IT hire.

Get Help With Developing an IT Strategy From Seasoned Experts

Now that you have a solid grasp on developing an IT strategy for your business, its importance, and the steps you need to take for successful implementation, it’s time to put your plan into action.

However, if you still require assistance with creating a comprehensive IT strategy for your business, we can help.

Complete Network’s team of vCIOs and consultants have helped small and mid-sized businesses develop comprehensive IT strategies for over two decades. We consistently earn praise and five-star reviews for our speed, friendliness, and reliability.

Learn more about how we can help you take your IT strategy to the next level by contacting us today for a free consultation.