IT Strategy Essentials
A Practical Guide
Sorin Dumitrascu
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
IT Strategy Essentials
A Practical Guide
Sorin Dumitrascu
About This Book
Information technology – or IT – has come to be regarded as a critical component of an organization's business strategy. In fact, companies may not reach their potential if their IT strategy isn't closely integrated with other business strategies. By collaborating with the business leaders in their organizations, IT managers can create technical solutions that support business objectives and add value to the organization.
In companies where IT and business leaders work together successfully, IT can be used to improve business processes and to drive innovation and change. This often results in new products and capabilities that give the company a competitive edge. So to get the most value from technology, leaders should take an integrated view of IT in their organizations. They can do this by ensuring their business and IT strategies are aligned.
This course can help you evaluate how well your company's IT and business strategies are aligned. It begins by describing the elements that an IT-influenced business strategy typically contains.
You'll find out how you can analyze the current IT situation in your own organization to determine at which stage of strategic alignment your company is.
You'll also learn to assess how your organization currently uses IT – and the value your organization hopes to gain from its IT systems.
Finally, you'll explore some strategies you can use to improve alignment between the activities of the IT Department and the business goals of your organization.
By learning how well the IT and business strategies are aligned in your own organization – and how to improve strategic alignment if necessary – you can help ensure that IT fully supports your business and plays a key role in its future success.
Frequently asked questions
Information
Understanding the Value of IT
- Investigate all the ways IT is used in your organization, and for each one, identify the benefits that have been realized.
- Classify the benefits into categories:
- Automation
- Knowledge
- Organizational Improvement
- Innovation
- Review the results to see if all areas of benefits are being realized and which areas might be worth exploring further.
- List the key management activities in your organization.
- Categorize each activity as either
- Operational
- Tactical
- Strategic
- Then identify how IT is used in that activity.
- After all activities have been classified, arrange the data by classification to see if one category of activity is getting more attention than others.
- Use the results to identify new possibilities for IT integration to support management activities.
- List the business processes that are taking place in your company.
- Identify the extent to which IT is used in each business process.
- Decide which business processes rely heavily on IT and which are independent of IT.
- Employees are free to focus on high-value tasks, resulting in increased productivity
- Team members are making smarter decisions, which lead to greater efficiency
- A company is structured in a flexible way, which results in workers enjoying more autonomy
- New processes make a company's products stand out in the marketplace, resulting in increased revenue
- Automation
- Knowledge
- Organizational improvements
- Innovation