Operating Principles - Taking The Positions Which Guide Strategy

IT Strategy ultimately will align the efforts of the IT Organization with that of the enterprise. Determining the operating principles of the organization will foundationally drive this alignment, and determine the initiatives which will be required as part of this alignment.

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Goals - Making Your IT Strategy Real

...I encourage you to apply this simple test to your IT strategy. Do you precisely know when you are successful? If not, either your goals are not defined, or are not tight enough. You invest a lot of time with not only developing your IT Strategy, but in directing the actions of your entire organization based on your strategy. Your goals will ground and focus you.

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Blindspots

...Every so often reality hits. An outside entity steps in to hold a mirror up to ourselves that provides a stiff body check to our egos. Sometime this is in the form of a player who has not been part of our league and provides a benchmark to compare to. Sometime, and this is the ego crushing part, it is in the form of a videotaping performed by a local tavern to entice vulnerable old men to watch their game while sharing a refreshment or two.

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Physics of IT - How Massive is my IT Organization?

As we have moved from an industrial to informational mindset, the pendulum has swung somewhat. While capabilities are still paramount, the bulk associated with what is required to provide these capabilities (assets and headcount) is no longer seen as necessarily being required. Over the last several years being nimble has been a mandate (spoken or unspoken). Use of external labor and business process outsourcing is seen as a way of providing capability while shedding mass (becoming more nimble). Cloud computing, similarly, is seen as a way to provide assets to an organization without directly adding mass to the organization.

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Physics of IT - Mass (of Capabilities)

While certainly not as straight forward as inventorying people or assets, the capabilities of the IT organization provide is another form of mass. Capabilities add process processes to the people and the technology (Vaughan Merlyn has a great post on differentiating capabilities from processes) and in so doing provide a business perspective of the scope of value provided by the IT organization. By cataloguing the capabilities of an IT organization it is possible to assess the mass this set of capabilities provides.

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