PLANNING FOR INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY,
By ENM
Planning for Business Change
• Business planning is an important organizational process of
team building, modeling, and consensus that analyzes and
evaluates key elements of the business.
• More specifically, it evaluates an organization’s internal and
external environments, forecasts new developments,
establishes an organization’s vision, goals, and objectives and
develops strategies, tactics, and policies to realize them.
• Effective IT planning is a key ingredient in achieving strategic
business success with information systems.
• Information Technology may not be the
business your organization is in, but it
certainly keeps things working as they should
• IT often represents 15 to 20% of the
organization’s annual budget and the
percentage seems to be growing every
year. Given this percentage, effective strategic
planning focusing specifically on IT seems
essential to success.
Introduction
• IT is a double-edged sword to most
organizations,
delivering
value
to
organizations and bringing challenges as well.
To realize more benefits and fewer challenges,
I think that IT must be planned and managed
Introduction
• IT strategic planning addresses the
design/development/acquisition
of
IT
solutions, implementation/support of those
solutions and the modernization of existing,
legacy solutions within the organization
INTRODUCTION
• Information Technology Planning is a discipline within
the Information technology and information systems
domain and is concerned with making the planning
process for information technology investments and
decision-making a quicker, more flexible, and more
thoroughly aligned process.
• According to Architecture & Governance Magazine,
(Strategic) IT planning has become an overarching
discipline within the Strategic Planning domain in
which enterprise architecture is now one of several
capabilities.
Arguments for Information
Technology Planning
• IT takes too long to adjust plans to meet business
needs. By the time IT is prepared, opportunities have
passed and the plans are obsolete..
• IT makes plans that don’t reflect what IT will actually
do or what the business actually needs. In the end,
business doesn’t understand how IT contributes to the
execution of strategy.
• Information regarding business needs and the costs,
benefits, and risks of IT capabilities comes from
sources of varying quality. IT then makes planning
decisions based on misleading information.
Conti…
•
•
•
•
IT projects over budget and behind schedule
IT projects not delivering expected value
Improves resource management
Increase communications in business
Strategies for Providing an Information
Technology Planning Capability
• According to Forrester Research, there are
several recognized strategies for providing an
information technology planning capability.
• A repository of application data
• Capability maps.
• Gap analysis tools
• Modelling and analytic capability.
• Reporting tools.
1.A repository of application data
• Planning tools provide a common inventory of
application data including costs, life cycles, and
owners, so that planners have easy access to the
information that drives their decisions.
2. Capability maps
• Link IT’s capabilities to the critical business
processes they support. These software tools
provide a graphical tool that clearly outlines how
the business capabilities that IT provides to the
business are linked to IT’s efforts
3. Gap analysis tools
• Alongside capability maps, planning tools
capture information about the future state of
business capabilities as dictated by business
strategy. Users leverage this functionality to
identify the areas where IT capabilities need
to be built, enhanced, or scaled back —
driving IT’s strategy.
4. Modelling and analytic capability
• These tools enable planning teams to create a
variety of plans, which can then be compared to
one another to weigh the pros, cons, and risks of
each. In addition, their impact on architecture
and current initiatives becomes visible.
5.Reporting Tools
Reports guide the planning team’s decisions —
for example, which applications have redundant
capabilities, have not been upgraded, or are
plagued with costly issues. IT’s strategic decisions
are therefore more easily justified
Evolution of IT planning
IT planning stages
• See below
12-14