Developing an IT Strategy

A common form of IT planning is called road mapping. Similar to the analogy of an actual road map, an IT roadmap is a device used to coordinate the various IT activities that at first glace can seem unrelated because of both geographical and departmental accountability issues.

The Basic Roadmap Model

The basic IT Roadmap model has many potential uses. These might include:

Strategy – a roadmap can be used for identifying the disparate interests of each department as it relates to IT infrastructure.

Independent model – the road map can be used as an organizational independent model of the computing needs of the entire organization that will be easier sell to the departmental stakeholders.

Communication – the road map can be used as a communication media for the entire organization.

When performing strategic planning for an IT infrastructure, there are three common phases involved: determining the current situation, identifying the upgrades needed, getting the stakeholders to approve the changes which usually involve a lot of compromise and finally installing and testing the upgrades.

The roadmap is the basic document that will outline this plan for the organization.

Current situation – this part of the document will lay out in detail all of the equipment currently installed, all operating systems, the maximum capacity of the network and each individual piece of equipment, the capacity actually being used, etc.

In an ideal world, the company would already have this information available. Unfortunately, most companies do not document their existing networks. Typically networks are expanded as needed without any consideration to what effect it will have on the overall IT strategy. This unplanned expansion frequently causes all kinds of interoperability problems which are responsible for downtime and lost productively.

To be charitable, poor documentation is caused by the fact that in most companies no single is responsible for the entire IT infrastructure. The basic problem is that server administrators deal with server capacity, network administrators deal with bandwidth usage and database administrators deal with storage capacity.

Other causative factors include:

• IT analysts are too busy with day to day operations

• Users have no idea what they need and the IT analysts rarely truly understand the user’s business needs

• Upper management has no clue how the It infrastructure fits into the bottom line so they tend to view it as an expense item rather than a cost of doing business and many managers confuse managing capacity with planning it.

The solution is to institute formal change control with a member of every stakeholder organization assigned to the change control group. Then this group can be tasked with doing the capacity and interoperability planning as part of the change control process.

That way each department member is responsible for seeing that the needs of his department are met. The advantage is that the representative will understand his department’s business needs and can explain them to the IT people so an accurate idea of what they are is defined so the necessary capacity can be determined.

The formal change committee can keep the IT department abreast of the management decisions under consideration in their department and advice their superiors if what they are planning is technically not feasible or outrageously expensive. The IT representative  can then get his people to come up with viable alternative solutions.

The Results of Developing a Road Map

Properly controlling the changes to the IT infrastructure are time consuming and can be expensive initially since you are diverting employees from their normal jobs. If your company is not experienced in using these techniques, it may be a good idea to hire consultants to set everything up and tech your employees how the process works.

Ultimately, formal change control will allow your company to save large amounts of money by installing on the capacity they need or expect to need with the next five years. Proper planning can eliminate a lot of expensive waste. Another benefit is that when properly planned the IT infrastructure will operate more efficiently with less problems and down time which will reduce the total cost of ownership. Managing your resources will also be easier because they were properly planned and implemented in the first place making optimizing much easier.

If you would like to discuss IT strategy planning and how it can help your company, please contact us