This chapter is from the book
Strategy & Planning
This functional area focuses on enterprise CIOs, divisional CIOs, and business executives who are responsible for the efforts to synchronize business technology with the business. The capabilities that must be developed to support this functional area ensure that a target set of applications will meet the needs of the business and reduce overall complexity. In addition, annual planning and budgeting must incorporate elements of business technology strategy and other evolving needs of the business. Four capabilities constitute the Strategy & Planning functional area:
- The Business-Driven IT Strategy capability articulates required business capabilities and the technology plans to enable them. This allows an organization to translate business strategy into specific required business capabilities. It defines principles to guide decisions on applications and infrastructure and supports plans for moving from as-is to target architectures.
- The Strategic Planning and Budgeting capability is necessary to define and link plans and budgets to strategy and enterprise architecture. Goals, milestones, and contingencies are identified and highlighted, as are planning assumptions and prerequisites.
- The Strategic Sourcing and Vendor Management capability deals with creating and managing relationships with those vendors best suited to an organization’s strategy. This includes identifying areas of strategic opportunity for outsourcing, co-development, and vendor selection.
- The Consolidation and Standardization capability integrates accumulated or acquired IT units and assets to ensure consistency with an organization’s strategy. This delivers improved performance by rationalizing the number of projects, assets, sites, and processes. It also extends to identifying which assets to eliminate, consolidate, or enhance, and which to standardize on.