Who can be bothered with an IT strategy these days? Well, you might not need a strategy in the old sense of the IT strategy, but you definitely need a plan for the future.
If you look at modern applications, with ease of use and ease of implementation, your people can and should really get using them from day one. This should mean working practices can change immediately if they are allowed to.
However, what about your legacy applications? They are still there holding the master data or running core processes. Integration may not be such an issue with modern tech but ignore your legacy at your peril.
Changes to these apps are typically costly and slow and are not transformative due to the need to reduce risk.
How to look at new tech
We can define tech into two types using this lens – old and new, slow and fast. Our plan for technology must be how to manage the two within the same ecosystem. This plan should include how do we migrate our data and processes from the legacy.
What we do with our data is probably more of an issue with move to cloud as we sign up to more Software-as-service apps, each with their own data store. The problem has not gone away from when we had our systems on premise, and we could not integrate them easily.
Planning changes to a business should not create a separate business strategy and technology strategy.
So, this comes back to the point, we need a plan, which answers similar questions we have asked before but where the scope has flexed and changed into meeting the needs of our new world.
Processes
Processes should be defined to enable collaboration and make use of automation where appropriate, allowing people to do more added value things.
- Apps that provide services either individually or across an ecosystem that are customer and user centric.
- Map what and where our data is, and how it is managed
- Create a secure environment for users and customers to transact within
- We need to ensure there is a succession plan for these applications, so they stay relevant and don’t end up being legacy in 5 years’ time.
At least with a strategy we have put a stake in the ground, but that is not the end. The real challenge is two-fold. One, do not spend so long developing the perfect strategy that it becomes irrelevant. Two, make sure it gets implemented. Easy really.