Aligning IT Strategies and the Boardroom with the IT Roadmap
Although the activities span far beyond the physical walls, the term Server Room is a useful metaphor to capture the team and IT strategies that deliver services and projects to the organization. IT’s central challenge is typically getting other stakeholders in the business to understand what the IT strategies and priorities should be to raise everyone’s service and satisfaction level. Unfortunately, for most of these teams, they are caught too far removed from strategic and organizational planning to influence the priorities of the decision makers. As a result, they struggle to get the business to understand many issues and risks until it is too late.
The following quote from a CPA White Paper describing the importance of IT strategy planning in private enterprises clearly captures the situation faced in many server rooms:
The CFO did not invite the vice-president of Operations and his IT management team to meet executive management to follow up on the plan’s implementation, despite the VP’s eagerness to do so. Only budgetary reports were required. Not surprisingly, some executive managers still do not consider IT as an essential part of their business, even though the company fully depends on it.
This disconnect between the boardroom status of IT versus its operational importance in many organizations is a significant obstacle to effective IT decision making. This obstacle leads to reliability and security risks that would otherwise be avoidable. It also hides from many management teams’ significant opportunities to leverage technology innovations that could lead to competitive advantage.
Our IT Roadmap process is designed to fill the gap between the boardroom and the server room. It creates a platform for discussions that will align IT investments with the business’ needs and priorities. Produced in plain business, not technology, language it helps the boardroom understand the greater context of IT decisions to support prioritizations of the investment choices. This will lead to better IT project outcomes. The IT Roadmap will raise the organization’s trust in, and the credibility of, the IT team.
