Strategic planning translates the enterprise vision and mission into how resources, including IT’s capabilities, are deployed to generate maximum value to the stakeholders.
Taking a top down approach to our engagement, we firstly obtain the aspiration of the senior team to understand their direction of travel as well as understanding their vision and mission statement for change.
Aim uses a structured approach when planning for an organisation's IT strategy, which includes:
We clarify the business context — how the business does and will win. We determine how the IT organisation can clarify the purpose and scope of the IT strategy in light of the business's vision, mission and value proposition.
We compare business and IT performance against an industry standard, and then we determine areas of risk and potential opportunities.
We develop processes and policies, including principles, financial management and metrics, for making the strategy come to life.
We then determine how best to create a group-level strategy, which can address the needs of the enterprise and all business units. We then formulate a process to transition individuals, teams and organisations from the current state to the desired, future strategic state.
We finally observe and evaluate the financial management mechanisms and the business success metrics to make adjustments that will improve business outcomes.
Traditionally, the outcomes of an IT strategy would be delivered through a business transformation programme to ensure the business outcomes are delivered against plan, timescales and budget, whilst ensuring the key stakeholders obtain the maximum value stated with the IT strategy.
Aim has had large success in delivering large business transformation programme which can be found in our case study area.