当企业没有清晰的企业战略，如何建立信息系统战略

Building an IS strategy when there is no clear business strategy

By John (Ras) Mahoney
Dec 27, 2001

The traditional approach to IT planning, where an IT plan was aligned with an existing business plan, is being replaced by one where business and IT planning are fused, to:

• Shorten the time to market for new services.
• Respond rapidly to IT-enabled opportunities and threats.
• Leverage IT-enabled value by connecting different parts of the enterprise.

Unfortunately, many enterprises have no clear, up-to-date business strategy. Many business executives claim strategic planning is no longer practical in today's rapidly changing environment. This is only partly correct. It remains essential to have a clear view of enterprise goals and how to achieve them. Long lead times for strategic IT development often compel the IS organization to plan further ahead than the rest of the enterprise, so shortcomings in business strategy are identified first and most strongly by IS planners.

The IS organization should not appear to drive enterprise business planning: Many stakeholders need to be involved. The increasing need to understand economic payoff from strategy increases the urgency to make progress despite ambiguity of enterprise-level strategy. To break out of this cycle, the IS organization must engage top leaders, communicate extensively and meaningfully, and create a model that connects business objectives to IT strategy elements.

Engage enterprise leadership and communicate with stakeholders
It is essential to use the enterprise's top leaders, including the CIO or equivalent, to validate proposed connections between business and IS strategy. Only they can manage the risks and uncertainties where IS strategy must be created without an adequate business strategy. They can also modify business strategy to reflect opportunities and threats identified by IS strategy planners. Where it exists, the IS relationship management team should orchestrate this communication.

Create a model that connects business goals with IS strategy options
IS planners should establish a simple model to connect the economic payoff (financial outcomes and other business benefits) to IS strategy proposals. It should include the following factors:

• Enterprise strategic imperatives (actions the enterprise must take to move in its chosen direction, including responses to technology-driven opportunities and threats)
• Business-unit goals (actions that business units expect to deliver defined returns)
• Operational imperatives (what the enterprise and the IS organization must do to continue working, including legal conformance or events such as the introduction of the euro)
• Enterprise and business-unit development initiatives

IS planners should elicit these ideas in dialog with business leaders. They may even need to prompt leaders to think about them if the ideas have not previously been well defined. The CIO should take a leading role in promoting and shaping these discussions.

The model should describe the expected outcome of each strategy proposal (e.g., increased profit, greater market share, improved efficiency), the risk of failing to achieve the outcome on time or on budget, and the risk of not attempting the outcome.

The model can most simply be made in the form of a spreadsheet that:

• Maps business factors and outcomes against IS strategy proposals, optionally applying weightings for the relative importance of, for example, corporate and business-unit outcomes.
• Includes indirect or estimated measures if necessary and uses broad scores rather than exact figures: Using 3, 2, and 1 for high, medium, and low cost, benefit, and risk will generally yield sufficient differentiation between high-level strategic options.
• Is simple, because the aim is to create scenario—not a fully prioritized plan.

Each business factor will generate one or more IS strategy initiatives. The IS planning team must apply judgment and synthesis to create several IS strategy scenarios from them. The enterprise's senior leaders should compare the scenarios, using the expected business outcomes in economic terms, and choose the most advantageous.

There is good practical evidence of what works well and what doesn't. Here are five best practices and five common errors based on Gartner's research and experience.

Five best practices

1. Connect all IS strategic proposals to business goals and metrics or to the necessary base infrastructure, if necessary, by establishing new measures. Use these connections to prioritize and measure IS proposals in business terms. Keep the model simple and flexible.
2. Communicate details of the emerging model frequently and clearly to ensure that all important issues are considered and to avoid misunderstandings.
3. Limit strategy creation to a predetermined period, and review and update the strategy later if necessary as circumstances change. It is better to have an initial direction and a sketch map so that the journey can start rather than wait until the whole journey is mapped in detail.
4. Ensure IS planners are on business-strategy planning teams from the start and throughout the process.
5. Engage top leaders in the enterprise to resolve strategic ambiguities and to manage uncertainties and risks.

Five common errors

1. Attempting to create inappropriate detail and false certainty.
2. Building or expressing IS strategy in terms of technology drivers rather than business objectives and benefits.
3. Failing to connect IS strategy to a business value model.
4. Creating the impression for enterprise business leaders that the IS organization is trying to take over business planning.
5. Spending excessive and uncontrolled time on consultation and consensus building.

Bottom line
When a formal business strategy is not available, CEOs, CIOs, and strategic IS and business planners should connect IS strategy to business goals using the value framework described. They should avoid the five common errors of IS planning. Unless IS strategy is defined and connected to business goals, there is a high risk of wasting money, missing opportunities, and losing business position.