Three key questions to assess if your IT strategy is meeting your business needs
There’s a saying that goes “A goal without a plan is a wish.” With that in mind, do you have an IT Strategy? Is it aligned with your business plan?
The reason this is important is that it allows you to make better decisions and be more proactive with your IT investments.
An IT strategy asks three key things:
1) Where are we now?
- What does your business look like now?
- What does your IT look like now?
- What are the good points and bad points?
2) Where do we want to go?
- What will your business needs be in the future, and
- What technology do we need to meet those needs?
3) How do we get there?
- What technologies will help?
- How do we change things to meet our needs?
This is the core of your IT plan
Bear in mind that the plan needs to be flexible, to ensure that the technology remains relevant in an evolving business.
Every IT investment answers one of more of our three drivers – capacity, capability or risk. This is the Kinetics “holy trinity” of IT investment. To get value for money, any IT investment/project/change should address at least one of these things;
- Increase capacity: Faster, more processing, less expensively.
- Increase capability: Allowing you to do something new that you didn’t do before. (e.g a website that allows online ordering – this could be the thing that gives your business the competitive advantage over others.)
- Reduce risk: make sure your critical equipment is covered under a warranty or enhance your ability to deal with a disaster or failure – increasing redundancy, enhancing backups
If you are about to sign off on IT investment, ask yourself which of these are being addressed and are you getting bang for your buck?
If you aren’t sure who in your organisation is best to answer these questions, it is probably time you tried a contract part-time IT Manager, to help you manage ALL your valuable IT.
Check out our structured, programmatic “IT Manager as a Service” approach to help you.