Why does the organisation’s IT Strategy go wrong?

In this era of economic fragility and ferocious competition, often IT takes the biggest hit when companies attempt to curb the costs. It wont be wrong to say that it is a totally foregone debate how important is IT for the success of any company. Despite the adverse economic ambience, IT remains fastest growing outlays for most of the companies.

Mostly companies fail to understand the business needs and thus end up wasting resources on services/projects which do not meet the business requirements. The scrimmage over the allocation of resources leaves IT and its business clients (which may be different department within the same company or altogether external clients) in delirium. Companies invest a lot of time, money and resources on IT projects which are actually irrelevant or not of much relevance for the business needs. IT strategy within any company cannot exist in isolation. In order to attain strategic alignment, it becomes paramount to list down lucidly the business objectives/goals through IT-business coordination and collaboration. Each of the ongoing and upcoming IT projects needs to be evaluated under the microscope for its relevance to business, cost of project, resources and time required and of course the risks involved. Based on the parameters such as regulatory necessities, business criticality, etc., all the projects should be segregated into “must do”, “good to have” and “can be postponed” categories.

For any company, the key questions to be asked are – is there a clear IT strategy for the firm? Does it align with the business goal/strategy? Whether IT services for the company is captive or outsourced, the organisations must check the IT spending because many companies get IT driven or are struck with IT wave. Many companies often find their IT expenditure skyrocketing and the stiff challenge they face is to curb the IT expenditure. In doing so, they generally cut the expenditure haphazardly, curbing many critical IT projects hurting the business. This calls for robust tracking tools to monitor IT usage, making IT expenditure more transparent. It is also required that companies periodically relook their IT and find whether they are using technologies/software which are outdated as they do for their operatives in other departments. As we might have witnessed, legacy systems continue to exist in many big organisations e.g. many banks still maintain their databases in mainframes. On one hand mainframes are supposed to be most secure, on other their maintenance costs are very high which is why organisations are migrating possible applications from legacy systems to open systems or rather new platforms which offers safe, secure environment– having low maintenance costs. The organisations should regularly perform IT security and risk assessment. This leads to the complexity of maintenance, migration and upgrade of company’s initial base of IT assets. Streamlining the entire system, considerably, simplifies the businesses’ underlying IT need.

The role of IT is to enable the business by ensuring that there is a strong and clear relationship between IT investment decisions and the organization’s overall strategies, goals, and objectives. To achieve this, organisations must ensure that IT funding and solutions align with business strategies; they must organize IT's financial, technical, and human resources around business value; and they must provide oversight of IT-related activities to manage IT-related risks. Conclusively, in my opinion a company’s IT strategy can be successful if it is able to answer following key questions (which they, often, dont):

•  Is there a clear IT strategy aligned with the business strategy, goal and objectives?
• Where is business, voraciously, consuming IT costs and what is driving these costs?
• Is it easy and efficient (including cost-effective) to implement IT changes or new IT infrastructure?
•  Are there clear procedures/tools to monitor IT expenditure and are they enforced?