Jeremy Wanamaker | May 17, 2024
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If you had to finish this thought, “My company’s IT helps our business to…” What would your answer be?
If an easy answer doesn’t come to mind, your organization likely lacks a clear IT business strategy. Misalignment between your strategy, company vision, and IT capability puts the organization and its customers at a significant disadvantage.
As Jeremy Wanamaker, CEO of Complete Network “Lack of a clear IT strategy fosters an unbalanced workplace where your organization’s competitiveness, focus, and future are hampered due to disorder.”
Luckily, it’s never too late to right the ship. This article will help guide business decision-makers and IT leaders who want to align their organization’s long-term goals with their IT.
Drawing on our expertise as a technology solutions provider, we’ll provide advice, best practices, and real-world examples that demonstrate how an effective IT business strategy is crafted and how it can spark digital transformation.
Leaders at companies with solid IT business strategies can easily enunciate their vision. For example, one client whose stated vision is, “My company’s IT drives operational efficiency through automation, streamlined workflows, and data-driven decision-making.”
Your vision helps establish a focused IT business strategy that guides employees and decision-making toward your main strategic objectives. Your IT business strategy influences everything from IT procurement to vendor partnerships to hiring.
Therefore, as trivial as it might appear on the surface, the first item we check off when assisting clients in crafting their strategy is forming a well-thought-out vision statement.
The formula we use to frame these statements is simple. Ask: “What does the company want?” and “How can IT help achieve it?” Using our company’s stated vision as an example, the “what” is to help clients triumph in the face of threats and competition.
The “how” is done by living at the bleeding edge of technological change, which allows us to think outside the box and forecast the types of solutions they’ll need.
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Next, let’s explore the role that an effective IT business strategy plays in your company’s overall success. We’ll cover four areas where a well-developed strategy improves the organization’s security posture, increases technological innovation, enhances customer satisfaction, and provides a competitive advantage in the market.
Your IT business strategy plays a crucial role in hardening your organization’s security posture by providing a structured framework to identify, assess, and mitigate cybersecurity risks early.
A well-defined strategy aligns IT initiatives with overall business objectives, ensuring that key security measures, such as employee training, compliance and regulation, vendor security management, and incident response, are integrated seamlessly.
When executed with precision, your IT business strategy not only steers you through the intricacies of complex technological decisions but also propels the organization toward a future marked by continuous innovation.
Rather than simply following the latest fads, a meaningful IT business strategy gives leaders the capacity to distinguish hyped-up trends from actual innovation that can positively impact the trajectory of your organization.
A well-crafted IT business strategy helps your workplace leverage the right technology to create an integrated digital ecosystem in which productivity flourishes. Nurturing a culture of collaboration by using collaborative tools, communication platforms, and popular project management systems will facilitate silo-less communication and cooperation among team members.
Furthermore, at a time when remote and work-from-home policies are increasingly seen as a competitive edge, information technology initiatives that transcend geographical barriers, enhance team connectivity and allow for real-time information and knowledge sharing will separate winners and losers.
Businesses can enhance customer satisfaction by using their IT business strategy to gather greater insights into users’ preferences and patterns, enabling more personalized offerings and refined marketing strategies.
An IT infrastructure designed with customer relationship management systems, data analytics tools, VOC (voice of customer), and customer journey solutions at the core enables your organization to better collect and process customer data and transform it into actionable wisdom for informed decision-making and better overall customer experiences.
As we’ve shown, crafting an IT business strategy is an intricate process with many moving parts. To simplify the process, we’ve developed four key pillars that form the foundation for all comprehensive information technology strategies.
Today, IT must go far beyond simply supporting core business goals and objectives. Technology should serve as a major contributing factor to overall profitability. To realize this ambition, decision-makers need to consider a fresh perspective regarding the underlying value that their technology solutions bring to the organization.
The goal is to squeeze out the maximum ROI from your IT investments. Choosing solutions that tangibly enhance value creation is the first step toward this aim. Other tips include:
Incorporating process automation into your IT business strategy demonstrates that you’re thinking strategically about the future. Adopting automation, once portrayed as employee replacement, is now viewed as a means of increasing productivity while minimizing burnout since automation empowers employees to get more done with less.
Tedious, time-consuming, and monotonous tasks can be offloaded to software, which is cheaper, has lower error rates, and has better compliance standards than humans.
Human teams can instead focus on delivering greater value by tackling more strategically significant work. Other benefits of automation include:
Data is the hottest commodity of our era. It’s what oil was in the 20th century. It’s the fuel that powers modern-day machine learning, IoT, new-gen cybersecurity, and intelligent business analytics. But just like oil in its crude form, raw data is useless unless refined.
Therefore, a successful IT business strategy should revolve around flexible data architectures designed to best tap and manage core business data in a manner that proves useful not only to business leaders but also to the broader workforce.
Opportunities in data include:
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Key performance indicators provide measurable and actionable information for business leaders to assess their progress in meeting strategic organizational goals and objectives. A few important benchmarks to consider in measuring the success of your IT business strategy include:
| Step Number | Activity | Description |
| 1 | Stakeholder Engagement | Gather input from all relevant stakeholders to understand their needs and expectations from IT. |
| 2 | Current State Assessment | Analyze current IT capabilities and identify areas of improvement. |
| 3 | Technology Audit | Review existing technology assets and evaluate their efficiency and relevance to business goals. |
| 4 | Risk Assessment | Identify potential risks related to IT operations and plan mitigation strategies. |
| 5 | Strategy Formulation | Develop a comprehensive IT strategy that aligns with business objectives based on the findings from previous steps. |
| 6 | Implementation Plan | Create a detailed action plan for deploying the new IT strategy, including timelines and resource allocation. |
| 7 | Monitoring and Adjustment | Regularly review the strategy’s performance and make necessary adjustments to stay aligned with business goals. |
Creating an IT business strategy that leads toward success isn’t easy. If you’d like expert assistance in crafting your organization’s strategy, reach out to Complete Network today!
With years of expertise, our team is equipped to navigate the complexities of modern-day IT solutions, offering strategic guidance that aligns technology with business objectives.
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Contact our friendly team any time at 877 877 1840 and [email protected]. We look forward to speaking with you!
In an ideal world, technology would be a consistent source of competitive advantage and benefit for small and midsized businesses. The reality is that many fail to realize that confidence.
Without the right resources and support, even a highly skilled technology team can become overwhelmed by the growing list of technology management duties. When important tasks get neglected, it creates ripple effects throughout an organization that damage productivity and efficiency.
The co-managed IT services model solves these problems by providing your existing IT team with all the support and resources they need to successfully plan, manage, and defend your network technology.
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