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December 7, 1998

IMHO:
Limitations Of Strategizing

By Helen Pukszta

he season for defining IT strategy is upon us. You will soon hold meetings, often off-site, to ponder how to align IS with business strategy. Driven by high-level business imperatives or wish lists from users, IT management will go through the matching and prioritizing process to decide what new developments to undertake.

And when it's all over, you'll publish your strategic plan and consider yourself done with IT strategy until next year. But before you congratulate yourself on completing the process, I'd like to suggest that your strategic planning may not be very strategic at all. Why? Consider these three common fallacies:

IT strategy always follows the organization's business strategy. Recent enthusiasm for business-IT alignment is a welcome improvement in the way organizations approach IT strategy. But there is a problem: Organizations typically implement the business-IT alignment with a unidirectional focus on aligning IT with business strategy and rarely on the converse--using IT to influence the business strategy itself.

This limited perspective hinders organizations from exploiting IT to create and identify--not just support--new business opportunities. While simply supporting existing operations delivers operational efficiencies, the significant payoffs occur when using IT for market positional gains or reconceptualizing of the value chain.

Strategic IT planning produces IT strategy. Why do we need strategic IT thinking? Because the intended strategy is not always the realized one. The reasons can be manifold.

New options and unexpected constraints present themselves and render parts of intended strategy undesirable, insufficient, or unfeasible. Unforeseen changes are stimulated by the actions of competitors, customers, and suppliers. And, for purely internal reasons, organizations aren't successful at implementing some of their intended strategy.

In this environment of constant change, the arrival of threats and opportunities can't be forced into a convenient timetable to suit the organization's planning cycle. And a business that wants to be flexible must be prepared to respond to fast-moving stimuli and to adapt its plans and strategies accordingly.

A brilliant IT strategy is always better than a less-ambitious one. IT strategy can be evaluated only in the context of the organization for which it was defined. Not all organizations are equally positioned to reap benefits from IT. And the wrong or unrealistic strategy can prove harmful to an organization's long-term ability to use IT in defining and reaching its business goals.

A successfully implemented--though less ambitious--IT strategy will increase the organization's confidence in its ability to obtain value from IT. And subsequent, evolutionary steps in the use of IT that stretch the organization's capabilities will produce significant incremental benefits.

Moving to an iterative, organizationwide ability to learn about the impact of IT is a challenging task that requires deliberate planning, often in conjunction with organizational and cultural changes.

A structured process and documentation are needed to record and communicate current thinking about the organization's IT strategy. But keep in mind its limitations. For one, such IT plans don't necessarily foster IT management's participation in crafting and influencing business strategies. Plus, planning can't substitute for the continuous process of strategic IT management in an organization. And these types of plans won't work unless they're suited to the organization's particular level of IT and organizational capabilities.

When your organization attempts to utilize IT for maximum business benefit, strategic IT planning will be very useful, but not sufficient.

Helen Pukszta is an independent consultant in Chicago specializing in IT strategy and management. She can be reached at helenp@flash.net

In My Humble Opinion is an occasional column expressing the opinions of InformationWeek readers. Submissions up to 750 words can be sent to imho@cmp.com. Only writers being considered for publication will be contacted.