BY PETER WANYONYI
For whatever cosmic reason, humans are not ordinarily endowed with the ability to foresee the future given generally varying factors. Given a few variables and a bit of experience, we can reasonably forecast what will happen over the coming one week or so. Where matters are very predictable – such as in politics – one can generally predict almost anything with a fair degree of accuracy. But forecasting in business is tough, and the emerging discipline of Data Science is only now attempting to build serious forecasting into business processes using more than just guesswork: it uses data, historical precedent, and similar inputs to come up with fairly accurate predictions of what is likely to happen.
Absent the sort of prescience reserved for Old Testament prophets, therefore, humans today are forced to take contingencies into consideration when making business decisions.
Contingencies are expensive, and covering all possibilities is impossible on a normal business budget for anything but the very smallest businesses. The rest of the business world is therefore left with one inevitability: planning.
Everyone plans, and every business – without exception – plans. Some plan explicitly: they have detailed plans that are arrived at by considering various factors, weighing and weighting them, and then arriving at a reasonable course of future actions that takes into account those factors and plots out an action path that is estimated to guarantee the business continues existing. Others plain by failing to plan, and as the aphorism goes, failing to plan is planning to fail. Information Technology (IT) is no exception, and IT managers are frequently tasked with spitting out various sorts of plans to satisfy the whims of their corporate bosses, primarily, but also to ensure that they have thought of and documents courses of action in the event that one or other of various factors comes to be.
All planning essentially boils down into two categories: planning for the near future and planning for the far-off future. How these two are defined depends largely on the organisation and the function in question. In IT, timeframes are generally more compressed than is the case in many other industries. Thus, a military general purchasing a fighter plane today can expect to have it in service for at least 10-15 years, maybe more if it is a third-world military more interested in show than in actual efficacy.
But an IT manager planning for applications and platforms cannot afford to expect similar lifespans for her systems, and must contend with systems lifespans that are at most about 5 years. This is not even optional: the interconnection of today’s systems means that your systems must be able to talk to other companies’ systems, and for this to happen there must be a reasonably uniform set of versions of systems out there. You cannot hope to be using Office 97 when everyone else is on Office 2013 – you will not even be able to open any documents they send you!
In IT, a strategic plan is one that outlines the overall goals of the IT organisation and why they are desirable. This is crucial, as it more or less determines success or failure not only of the plans themselves, but also of the IT organisation. Building an IT strategy must go beyond mere product roadmaps and which version of software is coming out when: the strategy must also provide for various what-if scenarios, must provide a backup strategy in case the primary strategy doesn’t quite pan out, and must wrap all these within the wider goals of the business that the IT organisation serves – after all, IT is a tool, and is therefore never an end in itself, but rather a means towards achieving organisational outcomes.
The IT strategic plan must clearly define the scope it addresses, and this must include all areas of information technology that affect the business organisation. The strategic plan must also address the business context in which it has been developed, because the business context drives the overall plan. And finally, a plan is effectively pointless without metrics: how to measure the achievement of progress as laid out in the plan.
Strategy in IT is about 5 years ahead. Software and hardware changes are generally embedded within 5-year to 8-year cycles, and an IT strategic plan covers that length of time, and is a living plan that is regularly updated to take into consideration technology and standards changes. But beyond the overall goals is the actual play itself: the set of steps taken to actualise the plan, to turn it from words on a page into actions on the ground. This is the tactical plan, and it is different from the strategic plan. It must understand and decipher the goals set out in the strategic plan. IT organisations need tactical plans so that they know what to do, when, and how to do it – and using what tools.
All tools and tactics used in the plan must lead to the desired strategic goals.
A common error of planning is to put together a group of tactical issues and then call them a strategic plan – this is nearly as bad as having no plan at all. The terms “tactical” and “strategic” address two completely different capabilities, one a subset of the other, and they relate differently to the management and governance of an organisation. To get IT right, it is vital that planning must be right – and differentiating between tactical and strategic plans is an obvious starting point.
The author is an ICT consultant based in New Zealand.