Developing an IT strategy is pivotal for the success of your business. Enterprises that lack IT strategy end up spending more on IT, their technology infrastructure such as cheap server hosting gets outdated quickly and they fail to protect themselves from cybersecurity attacks and data breaches. Not only that, they end up missing business opportunities that come their way due to lack of a clear direction.
Creating an IT strategy is not easy but it will pay rich dividends in the long run. You will have to meet IT and business goals, create a roadmap to take advantage of IT opportunities, mitigate the risks and develop IT principles and implement standards and policies. You will have to consider your application architecture, your current IT infrastructure consisting of VPS Singapore or New York dedicated servers as well as user needs to create a winning IT strategy.
New to IT strategy development? Don’t know much about creating an IT strategy? You are at the right place. You can follow in the footsteps of experts by replicating how they create an IT strategy for their business. This will help you to learn valuable lessons without making the same mistakes that they have made along the way.
In this article, you will learn about seven IT strategy lessons that you can learn from experts and create a successful IT strategy to guide your business on the path of success.
7 IT Strategy Lessons You Can Learn From Top CIOs
Here are seven IT strategy lessons you can learn from the best IT leaders.
- Think Long Term
When creating an IT strategy, you must shift your focus from short term objectives to long term goals. Look at the big picture and ask where you want your organization to be in the next five years. This can set you up for long term success instead of chasing short term gains. With a long term focus, you can prepare for emerging challenges and trends in a much better way instead of focusing too much on what is in front of you. You will have to broaden your scope and horizon to look beyond the present in order to create a holistic IT strategy.
- Have a Vision and Provide Clarity
Vision is what differentiate leaders from followers. If you are an IT leader, you need to have a vision not only for your team but also for your organization. What do you want to achieve in the next five or ten years? Once you have a clear vision, you can communicate your vision to your team members.
Make sure they buy into your vision by clearing all the misconceptions they have about your vision. Provide them with clarity they need so they can wholeheartedly support your vision. Eliminate all the roadblocks that might come in their way and provide them with resources and support them need to translate your vision into reality.
- Develop a Plan
Once you have decided on your final destination, now is the time to think about how you will get there. For this, you will have to create an action which outlines steps you need to take in order to progress towards your goals. Set milestones so you know exactly where you stand currently and how much distance you have to travel before you can achieve your goals. This will not only keep your team focused but also provide them a clear direction to move in. Define the roles and responsibilities of each employee and hold them accountable for their actions.
- Put Client First
Bernie Gracy, Senior Vice President and Chief Data Officer at Agero vividly remembers when a divisional president told them, “The only moral authority is a client. We create shareholder value when we help our clients help their customers.” This is the best advice I have ever received and guided my career.
To understand our clients preferences and needs better, I was willing to sit with and listen to marketing, sales, product management and account management teams. This has helped me tremendously in delivering value to clients irrespective of whether they are internal or external in nature.
- Prioritize People, Process and Technology
Kim Hales, senior vice president of IT at NRG Energy thinks that business efficiency comes from people processes and technology especially when you prioritize them in the same order. One of the common mistakes most businesses make is they think technology is the solution to all the problems. They don’t get people on board or develop the right processes to support it. As a result, their technology implementation fails.
It is the people who drive the technology and develop processes so put people first. No matter how good your singapore dedicated servers might be, if there are no processes to get the best out of it, it will be worthless. It will never deliver business value you want it to.
- Teamwork Is Key To Success
Whether you are a technology leader or a business leader, you can never achieve success alone. You need a team and you want it to work collaboratively to achieve a common objective. When your team gels together with other teams, it will automatically improve your business efficiency, help you churn out products and services faster and gain a competitive edge over your competitors. Most importantly, it will eliminate friction, hurdles and roadblocks so your business can easily achieve their targets.
- Measure and Improve
“You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” –Peter Drucker
Set key performance indicators to measure your performance. Harness the power of data analytics to get an idea about what is working and what is not. Once you know where the shortcomings are, it will be much easier for you to overcome those weaknesses. Moreover, you can double down on proven formulas which are delivering great results. You could also uncover actionable insights and identify hidden patterns which can easily get ignored by analyzing your performance.
Which is the biggest lesson you have learned when creating an IT strategy for your business? Share it with us in the comments section below.
