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In the final stage of the process you should be looking at defining your roadmap and multi-year plan. i.e.  how you plan to move forward with your IT strategy in the future. This blog completes the steps recommended for an effective IT strategy.

With an idea of the target vision for the IT systems and services the final step to a comprehensive strategy is to define the steps and to implement it.  It is not just sufficient to say what changes will be made but also to define how the services will evolve to improve costs, provide a costs benefit against business targets and how service levels will be adjusted. Ideally at each step behaviour changes in the organisation and changes to process flows will be needed too.

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This blog post underlines in importance of what I see as the first of three stages in completing an effective IT strategy – understanding where you are. Keep checking back for the second and third steps in the process.

Some consultants will call this “as now” or “current state” analysis. Whatever you call it, the critical point is that you must understand where you are and what you have before you can write any strategy to change it. Firms have all sorts of inventories but rarely have a good understanding of the systems and services they have, and more importantly how effective they are in terms of meeting business goals.

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