How do Changes in Business Strategy Impact IT Strategy?

The dynamic nature of business requires regular revision of its strategy. And IT needs to constantly keep pace with this change and readjust and realign with the business. Nonaligned IT can have serious consequences for the enterprise as it will inhibit the enterprise from realizing its business strategy.

1. AGILITY

Businesses need to be agile to keep up with the markets, and IT must be agile to stay aligned with the business. As business strategy evolves, there must be a constant assessment of the strategic business changes and their impact on IT. Few considerations:

• Does the existing IT infra support the new business strategies?
• What new capabilities are needed?
• How can existing systems best be leveraged?
• What new systems are needed?

Basis various surveys, agility is identified as one of the top 10 IT management concerns and it is also perceived as one of the weakest achieved goals (courtesy of ISACA and the University of Antwerp benchmarking study). This result hints at the ‘knowing-doing gap’.

2. IT AGILITY

Accordingly, to realize business IT agility, IT also needs to be agile. COBIT proposes IT agility to be measured through:

• Level of satisfaction of business executives with IT responsiveness to new requirements
• Average time to market for new IT-related services and applications
• Average time to turn strategic IT objectives into an agreed and approved initiative
• Number of critical business processes supported by up-to-date infrastructure and applications

3. DIGITAL AGILITY

In an age of digital transformation, digital agility allows enterprises to leverage digital tools and technology to move quickly and easily. Drivers for this are the same as other drivers for enterprises, primarily doing things faster and at a low cost.

Another key to enabling digital agility is fostering a culture that promotes change management and encourages creative problem-solving and collaboration.

4. AGILITY LOOPS

The target to be achieved is a tactically agile IT – one that senses and responds to environmental change efficiently and effectively. Agility is an ongoing process and not a one-time or occasional event. For the entire IT organization to be agile, all members of the IT organization need to understand the need for agility and be committed to this process. There are three work principles involved for the IT organization to be agile. These can be represented as agility loops:

• Loop 1 – Monitoring and Deciding – encompassing environmental monitoring and responsive decision-making.
• Loop 2 – Improving existing processes – improving existing operations to deliver efficiency
• Loop 3 – Creating new processes – focuses on creating new operations to deliver effectiveness

CONCLUSION

Business executive management along with CISOs needs to comprehend and align business strategy and IT strategy to achieve the organization’s objectives to bring greater than expected results by improving existing IT and introducing new IT solutions.