How can you make IT strategy evaluation more innovative and continuous?

Agile methodologies, including Scrum and Kanban, revolutionize IT not just in development but also in strategic evaluation. Here’s a succinct take: 1. Modular Objectives: Break IT goals into bite-sized, assessable tasks for swifter accomplishments. 2. Stakeholder Collaboration: Engage users and stakeholders continuously, ensuring real-world relevance. 3. Real-Time Adjustments: Agile enables immediate strategy tweaks, keeping pace with evolving scenarios. 4. Cultivate Learning: Beyond just delivery, Agile instills a continuous improvement mindset. In essence, adopting Agile goes beyond IT delivery, shaping dynamic strategies and fostering a proactive, learning-driven culture.

My colleague Ivar Jacobson once said, "Think big and build in many steps!" I've always found this to be sound advice. However, the mechanics of Scrum and so forth also contain a trap. It's easy to lose sight of your strategic goals and fail to achieve the outcomes required for success when your teams are focused on short-term deliverables using these DELIVERY methods. Successful strategy using Agile methods requires your OPERATING model (governance and organizational structure) to be aligned to your strategy and how you plan to deliver this. Automated, data-driven, and adaptive governance that supports small, dedicated teams in the delivery of increments of strategy that create the desired outcomes and benefits is key.

Integrate Data Analytics and AI While Agile frameworks offer a dynamic approach to IT strategy evaluation, the integration of data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can take your evaluation process to the next level. By leveraging data analytics, you can continuously monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and gain actionable insights in real-time. AI algorithms can predict future trends, identify potential bottlenecks, and even recommend adjustments to your strategy. Eg, machine learning models can analyze customer behavior to inform UX improvements or natural language processing can scan customer reviews for sentiment analysis. This real-time data-driven approach not only makes your IT strategy evaluation more innovative.

Having witnessed multiple shifts in IT paradigms over three decades, agile frameworks stand out as game-changers. While primarily known for their adaptiveness in development cycles, their application in IT strategy evaluation is profound. It facilitates a rhythm of continuous reflection and adaptation. Think of it as "sprints" for strategy where after short intervals, stakeholders gather to assess, recalibrate, and set forth with updated objectives. By embracing agile, we're not just responding to IT changes but dancing in sync with them, optimizing outcomes at every twist and turn.

Integrating tight security controls for any new software, hardware, cloud, edge, network, data, or AI strategy is a requirement. Gone are the days when sales and marketing thrust IT into markets to gain share at the price of unknown risks to systems design. Perhaps one of the biggest factors to effective IT advancements is having top level (board/CEO) support and transparency. This is also where the cyber security and business risk management control objectives need to be signed off on. A combined “bottom up” approach with everything from user access controls to patching to SSDLC to a continuously managed controls framework where established policies can better attested to around an agreed upon control objective is highly advised.

This is a bit of motherhood and apple pie on the surface. Critical though data is, you can easily overload people if you don't carefully consider HOW the data will be collected to measure the effectiveness of your strategic pursuits. This is particularly important in organizations that do not have a robust data culture or integrated tooling to automate the flow of data to governance functions. Without putting the building blocks for high-quality, low-effort data management in place reporting can easily become a burden and fall by the wayside as people are consumed by day-to-day operational demands.

Embrace a 'Fail Fast, Learn Faster' Mindset While data and analytics are invaluable for tracking performance and identifying areas for improvement, adopting a 'Fail Fast, Learn Faster' mindset can revolutionize your IT strategy evaluation. This approach encourages rapid experimentation and learning from both successes and failures. For example, you could implement A/B testing for new features, allowing you to quickly gauge user response and make data-informed decisions. Or, you could run small-scale 'failure simulations' to identify potential vulnerabilities in your IT systems before they become critical issues. This mindset, combined with robust data analytics, creates a feedback loop that not only identifies what needs to be improved

Data is the new oil, but unrefined, it's merely crude. Through my tenure, I've found that effective IT strategy evaluation hinges not on the volume of data but its insightful interpretation. Advanced analytics tools, when integrated with strategic evaluation, offer unparalleled insights. Beyond just performance metrics, predictive analytics can help forecast potential pitfalls or opportunities, enabling proactive strategy adjustments. A data-driven approach eliminates much of the guesswork, ensuring decisions are grounded in tangible insights, ensuring continuous alignment with business goals.

Integrate Cross-Functional Teams for Holistic Insights While design thinking provides a framework for innovation, the integration of cross-functional teams can elevate your IT strategy evaluation to the next level. Imagine combining the insights of your IT professionals with those of marketing, finance, and operations. This multi-disciplinary approach can uncover hidden synergies and create a more comprehensive view of how IT impacts the entire organization. For example, your IT team might propose a new data analytics tool they believe is efficient. A finance team member could then assess its ROI. This collaborative evaluation can result in a more robust and universally beneficial IT strategy

Design thinking transcends its origins of product design, becoming a lighthouse for holistic problem solving. Its essence lies in empathy, which, in IT strategy evaluation, translates to understanding the intricate web of user experiences and stakeholder expectations. By embracing this methodology, we can reimagine strategy from a user-centric lens, ensuring that solutions aren't just technically sound but also resonate with end-user values and aspirations. In essence, design thinking adds a layer of humanity to the often binary world of IT, fostering solutions that genuinely resonate.

This is a place that far too often falls by the wayside, and many IT departments describe themselves as the shoemaker's children of the organization when it comes to integration and tooling. A robust, integrated tool chain is the backbone here, particularly at scale. It should be structured in a way that allows you to visualize not only projects specifically aligned to the strategy, but the whole breadth of IT activity and the health of the assets (apps, infrastructure, data, etc) managed by IT. This is not a minor effort, and IT departments must be prepared to invest in building and maintaining this to save their people from the burden of doing this manually.

Embrace Real-Time Analytics for Instant Feedback While traditional feedback systems like surveys and focus groups are valuable, the advent of real-time analytics tools can revolutionize your IT strategy evaluation. These tools can track user behavior and system performance in real-time, providing immediate insights that can be incredibly useful for making quick adjustments. For instance, if a new software deployment is causing user errors, real-time analytics can alert you instantly, allowing for immediate remediation. This is particularly useful in today's fast-paced business environment where waiting for quarterly survey results can mean missed opportunities or prolonged inefficiencies.

This is where most businesses and departments fall. Especially when it comes to IT, we can often get hyper-focused on the technical development track but forget that, ultimately, the system needs to support your end users and business goals. Because of this, before any investment in made in a solution or even time is spent on investigating the market and what is next, you should be asking your users what works, what doesn't and what they would like from the system. If you can do this then you laying a foundation of trust to build.

In the vast IT landscape, feedback is the compass that often points to uncharted territories of improvement or innovation. The immediate benefit of feedback systems, from my experience, is their ability to provide real-time pulse checks, negating the need for periodical, often outdated evaluations. An evolved IT strategy evaluation includes dashboards integrating feedback metrics with performance indicators. Such a blend offers a 360-degree view, highlighting not just the 'what' but also the 'why' behind performance metrics.

The IT realm, vast as it is, operates on a foundational principle—no need to reinvent the wheel. Throughout my career, I've seen organizations soar by assimilating external best practices and tailoring them to their unique ecosystems. In the context of strategy evaluation, it means looking outward, learning from industry leaders, and then looking inward to see how these insights fit or can be adapted. Regular participations in think-tanks, consortiums, or strategy conclaves can provide fresh perspectives, ensuring that the evaluation process itself evolves continuously.

+1 This is a key thing we see in our research, and ITRG's members that leverage the diagnostics and benchmarking services embedded in our memberships have been able to define better strategies and demonstrate their performance much more readily.

In IT, we love the term best practices; it's like a get-out-of-jail-free card. We don't have the answer, but this blanket statement will solve it! I'm afraid I have to disagree that best practices should always be the crutch you lean on; there is a 100% need to implement vendor-recommended best practices where they fit your business goals. However, if best practice says you lock all the doors and windows, disconnect the internet and don't engage in any activities to stay safe. Well, this is going to destroy your business! Therefore, you should ensure you take on best practices but adapt them to suit your strategic needs.

Embrace a Culture of Experimentation While learning from best practices provides a solid foundation, it's equally important to cultivate a culture of experimentation within your IT department. Best practices can sometimes become outdated or may not perfectly align with your organization's unique needs and challenges. By encouraging a mindset of continuous experimentation, you allow your team to test new approaches in a controlled environment, gather data, and quickly iterate. This can be as simple as A/B testing different software interfaces to see which is more user-friendly, or as complex as piloting a new data architecture. The key is to measure the results rigorously and be willing to pivot or iterate based on what you learn.

Start Bottom Up, Not Top Down! Strategies succeed when your teams clearly understand the strategy, and more importantly their role in ensuring the success of the strategy. If you focus on enabling them to deliver their part through a combination of training, coaching, automation, and reinforcement you will be able to manage the delivery and performance of your strategy much more readily than if you focus on your needs first.

An IT strategy that doesn’t align with the organizational strategy is useless. You can use whatever IT evaluation strategy you like but if the internal and external customers are not considered then IT evaluation is just an exercise in futility. Your leadership and culture play a vital role here.

Any Strategic planning completed for IT in the modern age has a short shelf life; you cannot be doing the IT planning of old and laying down a 5-10-year plan and trying to follow that to completion. Most Strategic plans should be no more than 24 months. You can include a section of the statement for the vision into 36 months and beyond, but this is likely to be outdated and dismissed around 18 months. When working on strategic planning for IT systems and services, start with the gains you need today and then build out to around 18 months with solid footing. Then for months 19-24 , build out with a path you would think to follow, but review it at month 18.

While the tools and methodologies are paramount, the underpinning philosophy of continuous improvement is crucial. IT strategy evaluation is as much about the mindset as it is about the process. Encouraging a culture of introspection, where every team member, from executives to ground-level technicians, adopts a mindset of constant evaluation and evolution, is key. Moreover, never underestimate the value of cross-industry learnings. Sometimes, the most profound insights emerge from sectors vastly different from our own, offering a fresh lens to view and evaluate our strategies.