As companies grow, they need to become more structured in how they spend their IT budget. Companies often understand that they need to spend more money on IT to enable growth or increase efficiency. But setting the priorities is a challenging task: should we invest first in an ERP? Or in CRM? Or in migrating to cloud applications? Or are operations processes the first priority?
Our IT strategy project template is designed to answer this question. It typically consists of 5 steps:
During the IT audit stage, we look at the current situation in IT: infrastructure, applications, projects, staff, suppliers, projects, and IT budget. We aim to understand what exists today and how much it costs. This will be the baseline, against which all proposed changes to IT will be framed.
During the business process diagnostics stage, we map current key business processes, look at how they are supported by IT today, as well as identify, quantify and prioritize key business process improvement opportunities.
During the enterprise architecture planning stage, we start looking at how to transform business process improvements into specific IT architectural improvements, at 4 levels: business domain, IT application, data and IT infrastructure.
During the IT team and governance stage, we consider how the IT organization has to be changed to support the new architectural components which were defined during the architectural stage. Diagnostics or introduction of IT service management processes (e.g. ITIL, COBIT) is often considered during this stage.
Finally, during the ROI stage, we develop business cases for all our recommendations, aiming to develop a convincing story for the board on how the chosen IT strategy will pay back over a number of years. Specific financial return measures (ROI, NPV, IRR) are calculated and presented.
If you want to see samples or discuss how we could help with your project, contact us at partners@intellico-solutions.com.