Creating an effective IT strategy is so important for businesses. You want your IT investment to reach its fullest potential so that your business can grow, jump on new and exciting opportunities, and reach your goals.
But wait – it’s not all about having a great IT strategy, it’s also about understanding how to implement and apply it. After all, you’re buying into your business’s future. It’s your roadmap to success.
We’ll show you how to kick off your strategy in the best way to enable your organisation to make better business decisions that are in line with your overall goals.
An IT strategy is an iterative process that shapes how your organisation’s technology should be used. In turn, this will help your business improve efficiencies and meet its goals!
It’s important to remember that no matter how successful a business is, resources are always limited. You are limited in time, money, people and IT infrastructure. Having a plan can help your business allocate your resources properly and maintain a clear direction.
You may have already performed a SWOT analysis based on a PPT framework: People, Processes and Technology. By balancing these three components, your business is sure to maximise efficiency throughout your IT strategy implementation.
First consider this: what do you want to achieve?
This could be you want to serve a completely different type of customer base, or you want to enhance your cyber security, or save time and money by simplifying your processes, or anything else!
Now ask yourself this: are these goals short-, medium- or long-term goals?
Ideally, you’d want your IT Strategy to support your business’s long-term goals. There isn’t much sense in investing time and resources into implementing a quick fix and then having to recreate a new strategy with new technologies later on. Think of the big picture and implement something sustainable, especially if you’re planning on entering into an M&A later down the line.
Another question to ask yourself is this: do your goals align with your organisation’s values? Are they maintaining a customer-centric approach?
Once you have a clearer understanding of what you actually want to achieve, it’s time to assign tasks to the right people.
A critical part of implementing an effective IT strategy is assessing who will be involved, and what areas they will be responsible for.
Involve important stakeholders such as your MSP, yourself the business owner, departments that are directly involved and whoever else you’ll directly be assigning tasks to.
To avoid overwhelming your team members, it’s really important to set deadlines and clear expectations so that there’s no room for miscommunication (more on this later).
The next step is to define what metrics you’ll be using to measure progress and success. How else will you know what areas you’re succeeding in and where your IT strategy can improve?
Let’s break it down…
If your overall goal is to spend less time in the office, one of your focus areas may be to increase and improve employee training with the tools and technologies you use.
To reach this smaller goal, you’ll then set out a series of micro-tasks to help reach it. This may look like setting up a required training program, or it may look like developing other programs that may be more effective and easier to learn.
When it’s time to measure the implementation of your IT strategy, you can measure whether these training programs were completed, in what timeframe, or if you have incorporated new software for your team.
Since you’ll have a lot of tasks being worked on all at once, you’ll want to choose at least one KPI for each individual objective. Remember to keep these KPIs fairly simple and easy to measure.
Your timeframe represents each mini-milestone for all of the tasks that need to be carried out. Whether it’s a 3-month timeframe or a 3-year timeframe, defining these milestones will hold each individual accountable, and lead to further progression.
Start off by looking at all of the tasks that need to be worked on, then create a reasonable timeframe where you’ll be able to gather enough information to measure. When the time comes, review your progress using the KPIs you chose earlier on. We recommend conducting reviews at least quarterly. For some, this may be better monthly.
From here you’ll start to see how your business IT strategy is performing.
IT strategy implementation can be difficult and does require ongoing planning, monitoring, analysis, and assessment. It’s not a one-and-done task, but rather a continuous process of iteration. Good things take time, right?
If you’re ready to start implementing your IT strategy (or maybe you need help creating one), our team of IT experts are here to help. As part of our SecureOffice solution, we provide strategic consultancy services that help your business perform at its absolute best. Talk to us today to hear how we can make your business vision come true.
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