You Need to Focus on Tactics, and IT Needs Strategic Alignment


23 April 2010 Susan Cramm


Susan Cramm discusses the importance of collaborating with your IT department.


None of us like to be told how to get our job done, and the creative, well-educated problem solvers in IT hate it more than most. If you want IT leaders to support your every whim (or, more realistically, given the overwhelming demand for IT services, even one of your whims), it's imperative to collaborate with them during strategic and tactical planning. Strategy is a carefully designed plan of action to achieve an important goal, and a strategy that has broad buy-in will allow you to take control of your destiny and to secure the resources necessary to transform plans into reality.

The endgame isn't simply about getting along better with IT; it's about expanding your strategic impact. IT not only supports the execution of business strategy but also expands strategic options, as demonstrated in the early days by American Airlines and Frito-Lay, and more recently by Walmart and Amazon.com.

IT-smart business leaders view IT as a competitive weapon and understand the importance of integrating business and IT strategy development, with almost half of them identifying IT needs when they develop business strategy (in comparison, only 10% of "IT-dumb" business leaders do so).

What strategy?

Did I hear you whisper, "What strategy?" When asked about their strategy, many leaders sheepishly try to pass off a list of annual objectives or key initiatives and hope that the discussion ends there. When asked to articulate what the future will look like two, three or five years down the road, many a leader responds with words to the effect, "I know what it is, but I just can't quite put it into words".

"It is imperative to collaborate with your IT department during strategic and tactical planning."

Strategy-making is a moving target in a complex and changing world, and it's easy to let the drum beat of demands overwhelm our calendars and our ability to see beyond the short term.

Many leaders have a jaundiced view of strategy, because they don't see high-level strategies drive day-to-day decision-making. In general, only 45% of executives are satisfied with the strategic planning process, and only 23% indicate that major decisions are made in accordance with strategies already in place. The real value of strategic planning should not be judged by whether or not plans are executed exactly as written. Rather, the impact is in improving the quality of daily decision-making so that tactical execution is strategically grounded.

Who's responsible for strategy?

It's your job. Leaders want strategic clarity, but they tend to expect it to come from above or outside rather than from within. When it comes to IT-enabled strategy, each party is waiting for the other to make the first move.

Rather than wait for a formal invitation, you should take the initiative to fill the strategic void. Although I have spent the better part of my career exhorting IT leaders to initiate strategy making with their business counterparts, it makes more sense for business leaders to take charge. After all, it's your people, it's your process, and it's your P&L. If you are waiting for your IT counterparts to insert themselves into your strategic planning and decision-making processes at just the right time, you'll more often than not be disappointed.

If you decide to order up IT "à la carte", understand that your IT "waiter" will probably be a little surly, and many items may not be available in a timely manner or may be too rich for your wallet. If you have tried to get IT involved to no avail, it's time to escalate the issue, starting with your relationship manager and continuing up the IT chain until you get satisfaction.

"IT-smart business leaders view IT as a competitive weapon."

How will an IT-enabled strategy help me?

Many business leaders find it difficult to get IT projects approved, in part because they don't know how to get IT's attention and sell their projects in a way that unlocks the various governance doors that stand between good ideas and the necessary funding and resources.

The key to justifying projects is to demonstrate the link between your projects and the strategy of the enterprise.

Of course, it's hard to link to something that isn't written down. "Most corporate strategic plans have little to do with strategy," says Richard Rumelt, UCLA's Harry and Elsa Cunin chair in business and society. "They are simply three-year or five-year rolling resource budgets and some sort of market share projection." In the absence of an articulated strategy, managers use a watered-down surrogate: the list of initiatives that survive the annual financial planning process.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Edited excerpt from 8 Things we Hate About IT. © 2010 Susan Cramm. All rights reserved.