CASE STUDY: CREATING AN IT STRATEGY
AUTHOR: ALLAN AITCHISON
ALIGNED IT CONSULTING

Case Study:Creatingan IT strategy 1
CASE STUDY: CREATING AN IT STRATEGY
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
IT strategy and business alignment have been buzzwords in IT for many years. The importance
of IT strategy is to create a vehicle to prioritise IT on what the business needs – usually seeking
and supporting business advantage and increasing profit. IT strategy and the business plan it
supports will change over time – but through spending sufficient time to create the
understanding and a common language to discuss it, greater economies of scale and project
dependencies can be found which in turn reduce cost, complexity, risk and delivery timescales.
Creating an IT strategy is iterative – gradually adding more detail as trust builds. In this case
study benefits were already being delivered during the drafting process and as this process
created an IT strategy which contained a self-funded profits increase of 3,000% while reducing
the cost of IT by 60%, the acceptance process was brief!

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THE LINKS BETWEEN BUSINESS STRATEGY AND IT DESIGN
IT strategy affects the relationship between IT, the customer and IT ’s suppliers. In summary
an agreed strategy will focus the IT organisation on what is required from the board and directly
contribute towards the goals of the business. This raises the game of IT from an inefficient
order taker to an organisation focused on contribution and measured against this goal. To make
this possible – multiple levels of IT will need to communicate with the business from the IT
leader to help desk staff and collaborate to improve the company. The strategy provides a
coherent view of the priorities the business need and through this the shape and focus for the
IT team.
The team supporting IT operations are likely to decrease its budget as greater economies of
scale and reducing overhead in internal processes will allow it to deliver with more automation
and reliability as operable projects based on standardised technologies are handed over to skilled
operational staff.
The team supporting business change is likely to increase its budget as trust grows and the
team tend to deliver more quickly and reliably as they become focused on a smaller number of
profitable, concurrent projects.
The organisation of the IT team will change as its focus and unique selling point will be its
connection to the business and it follows that many elements of IT are commodity – so another
element of creating a strategy is more likelihood of outsourcing to service providers, system
integrators or cloud providers as greater economies of scale are found and service needs are
better understood.

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WHAT DOES AN IT STRATEGY CONSIST OF?
An IT strategy underpins IT and it’s suppliers on supporting the business strategy and using
methods and technologies to improve. IT can focus through taking more control of the change
portfolio – using project dependencies across the portfolio of projects to recommend solutions
to create an active business support organisation focused on profit to become a partner to the
business it supports.
IT strategies tend to be built on a forecast of
between 3 to 5 years, with the detail being seen
as complete in the near term with reducing
reliability/detail as the forecast projects further
into the future. IT strategies are an integrated
set of views that are represented on the left.
Each row is strongly influenced by the row above,
but may also influence it. The IT strategy can
cover this list of topics or a subset but as
confidence in the strategy process grows, more
areas may be included. The early elements are
included towards the top of the diagram.
Finding an appropriate level of detail is important.
Most customers are more interested in cost and
profit forecasts, they will want to understand the
reason for change and why the ordering of projects, technology choice or changing the IT shape
is important and all may need to be justified. A summary level IT strategy is normally required
showing principle projects and their outcome is usually required – allowing the business to
understand the scale of change and allowing a starting point to examine detail as required.

Case Study:Creatingan IT strategy 4
BACKGROUND
In one organisation where I led the IT recovery, there was little or no project management office
and no IT strategy, leading to no overall control of change and no target to aim for. The
transformation from an unfocused, under-delivering organisation took building back the basics
and then using trust created through delivery to support the transformation of the IT team
supported by an IT strategy.
MAKING THE CHANGE
There was a pressing need to deliver a large backlog of projects to create trust in IT delivery and
to deliver a list of interconnected projects as some were business critical (safeguarding 100% of
revenue). Delivering this capability created a means to manage delivery and the team – freeing
up the team to become more productive.
Initial work with the business was built on a series of discussions with multiple user groups to
find a vision for each business unit consisting of an ASIS (today) and TOBE (vision) view together
with an understanding of the appetite for risk and cost. A simplified view was shown to key
suppliers to gain an idea of cost and dependencies managed to reduce cost and risk. The
resulting plan was shown to the business – with improvements based on feedback.
The business had not received the level of service it needed from its principle service providers,
which led to the drafting and acceptance of an updated set of service levels which in turn led to
changed suppliers.
The delivery of the project backlog, together with early strategy projects helped the business to
see the advantages of the plan and that the plan was built on firm foundations. As the strategy
was based on a self-funded increase in profit, while reducing the total cost of IT significantly it
was seen as an excellent base to invest time in – with the initial 3 months set of projects happily
accepted and increased levels of collaboration resulting in continual strategy improvement and
IT delivery effectiveness and efficiency.
Examples based on this case study and the IT strategy view model included in the previous
section are included below. Some examples have to be obscured simply because of the initial
state of the team.

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In this example a vision of what
was needed, mapped onto the
highest level view of the company
and the systems that support it.
This view helps to capture the size
of the change that would be
required.
In this example of budget and
benefits forecasting, a series of
high profile projects are shown
separately on the scale on the left,
while cumulative benefit is shown
on the scale on the right (in blue).
In this case it demonstrates a
series of projects that deliver
cumulative benefit – with the
benefit of the second project
improved by the first leading to a
large increase in value.

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This example of a target operating
model was a simple view of how
IT needed to change to allow one
element would be constrained in
size and contain staff that are
deeply knowledgeable about the
business, while another part of IT
could be flexible in size, topped
up by contract staff when needed.
In this example, the technology
needed to be understood and
managed across a large estate.
The tool shown collates various
data from operational tools and
compares a proposed technology
roadmap against the estate –
showing all exceptions. This view
publishes future change of the
estate, provides data for the
management of the estate and
the cost of proposed roadmaps.
LESSONS LEARNT
Creating, improving and delivering IT strategy is all about communicating a shared set of ideas
and priorities, supporting IT align to these priorities and deliver business priorities. Some
organisations need a long and deep process to find this data through to in one case writing an
approved strategy in 2 weeks. As with many best practice frameworks – the reader should pick
those elements that are most relevant to them.
Putting in place an IT strategy is likely to involve a wide change – with changes affecting all of
the IT team and is likely to affect staff incentives, training, supplier management and contract
management. It does not have to happen at once – but building a coherent framework to shape
the change allowing staff to buy in to the ideas and benefits needs careful consideration before
publishing.
Key elements of collaborating on an IT strategy are:
 A customer that can see the benefit of new ideas
 Reduce or eliminate IT inhibitors for change

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 Knowledge and experience of delivering an IT strategy – this approach is different to a
traditional IT organisation with skills and experience vital to create the confidence from
the business and supplier communities as well as IT itself.
 Supplier management
 Refreshing IT KPIs – to provide the data to find areas for improvement or justify expense
but also to demonstrate the transformation.
 Consultative and iterative approach – IT strategy is built on consultation, using the best
ideas from multiple sources. Regularly the greatest improvement comes from the
responses to drafts.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ALIGNED IT
Allan Aitchison is an accomplished IT Director with multi-sector and
international experience that blends blue chip client side and consulting
experience. His experience in being able to focus IT organisations on
customer needs has become key to his career and he is currently delivering
this at Aligned IT Consulting. This case study draws from his personal
experience and demonstrates how to focus a large organisation to deliver
tangible improvement to the bottom line.
ALIGNED IT CONSULTING – WHAT WE DO
Aligned IT Consulting’s goal is to create a similar step change in IT for our clients. Our goal is
delivering your vision, using our skills, energy, experience and Products. Aligned IT Consulting
has used this and other experiences to create a series of products that can help Align IT and
suppliers to the business it supports changing the aspiration from fixing problems to actively
seeking and delivering value.