Creating the IT Strategy

Here are some of my thoughts on how to create the IT Strategy.

Obviously the strategy will depend very much on where you are as a business and where you are with your supporting technology.

Is this your first strategy? Are you new to the company/business? Is the business new? Has there been a lack of investment? Has there been a merger or buy out? Etc.
All or any of these may have an impact on the strategy.
Because I cannot answer these for you and don't know your business or where your technology stands I can only give some general guidelines for creating the strategy.

The first task is to take stock. What have you got at the moment in terms of IT software applications, Infrastructure (The Hardware, System software and networks that support the IT environment) People (the IT department structure) and governance (the Management of IT including Help desks, Disaster recovery, Policies, Process etc.)?
What is the state of what you have? Is it out of date, are there known problems (look at help desk records, interview IT staff and operational staff to identify shortcomings).
How is it integrated? Do you have islands of information?
What projects are underway or planned? What do you measure at the moment? What are the costs associated with IT. What is this as a percentage of turnover? Have you or can you benchmark your IT costs against your competitors?

Then do a bit of market research, what are other players in your space up to? What technology developments are likely to open up some opportunities for you? Speak to IT suppliers, your peers at other companies and any professional organisations you are involved with.

Next I investigate the business. Get hold of business plans at central and/or departmental level and extract key directional statements such as 'seeking efficiency' or 'new product' creation. Armed with this knowledge interview senior executives (make sure you discuss in business terms and use detail from their business plans and try to avoid IT speak) to ascertain how IT can help them achieve their goals and also where it may be falling down today. Talk about some of the market research work to see if that stirs up any new interest.
Talk to clients and find out what they are looking for from you or your industry and what direction they are going in. Seek to identify what added value you could bring to clients through technology.

The above activities don’t necessarily need to be done in sequence

You should now start to get an idea of what the business wants and be able to map that against current capability and start to show any gaps.

The formulation of your strategy should now start to become clear but to be sure create a working party that you can run your findings and directional statements against to make sure you are going in the right direction before producing the first draft.

Once you have done this work once it should be easier in future years to update your strategy.