Overview
The alignment of information technology with the overall business objectives is one of the most critical yet often ignored aspects to making best use of IT within a business. We will work with you to understand your business, your existing IT systems and infrastructure to identify the critical issues that need addressing to improve how your company uses information technology.
Understanding the Business Context
Our first step is to understand our customer's business context. We analyse your competitive position using tools such as Porter's 5 Forces and PEST analysis to review the external environmental factors that influence the firm. Working with your directors and senior managers we use these findings to identify your firm's critical success factors, your core competencies, the company's strategic intent and its competitive strategy.
This analysis results in a summary of what your company is aiming to achieve, in what way it differs from its competitors and how it is going to achieve these aims. A successful IT strategy must support this aims and methods.
Information Management Strategy
The next part of the process is to understand the company's IT, this has a number of different elements;
- Strategic position of business systems
- Organisation and role of IT/IS department
- Information systems strategy
- Information technology strategy
Strategic Position of Business Systems
Reviewing your existing business systems and determining their strategic position gives an excellent overall summary of the importance of the various business systems to the business.
We use a process that plots each of your company's business systems's strategic impact against the strategic impact of the application development portfolio. The result is a grid, similiar to the Boston Consulting Matrix, that identifies which are your critical business systems, who maintains and supports these applications, what is their future, and can you make more strategic use of these systems.
Organisation and Role of IS/IT Function
We often find that one of the most critical factors that determines the relative success of IT use within companies is the IT staff and their role. Proffitt Consultants look at the IT department's structure, its critical mass, its organisation e.g. centralised versus decentralised, how third parties are used if at all, and finally the role of IT staff.
The role of the IT department within the company is one of the most important aspects. Are they a support function or are they responsible for continuous improvement? Who is responsible for implementing, upgrading and improving business systems, who provides ongoing support for hardware and software? Are the IT function expected to provide guidance on best practice, who is responsible for ongoing business system development?
Information Systems Strategy
A company's information technology strategy defines the company's approach to IT infrastructure. This encompasses how important the IT infrastructure is to the company's day-to-day operation and hence the company's approach to risk, whether in-house staff or third parties maintain the infrastructure, degree of centralisation/de-centralisation, the standards that are followed etc.
We aim to understand your information technology strategy and to determine how well it is aligned with the business context. For example the company has no in-house IT skills yet is highly dependent on technology to support the day-to-day operation, alternatively the company may have invested in highly resilient infrastructure that is 100% resilient but if required could operate without technology for 3 to 4 hours.
Outputs
The culmination of the process is an interactive presentation, during which we will present and discuss our findings. The overall objective of our review of your IT strategy is;
- Agree the company's IT strategy
- Identify how closely IT is aligned with the business's plans
- Clarify the key information management issues
- Improve how the business uses IT
- Increase business confidence in IT function
Next Steps
The output of our IT strategy review typically results in a number of projects focussed on addressing the key information management issues that the process identified. Typcially these issues are not technical issues, more commonly they are procedural, management and staff issues.
Typical projects are;
- In-depth review usage of key applications
- Increase infrastructure resilience / performance
- Alter how information systems are delivered
- Improve IT department customer service
- Application portfolio is not strategic
- System selection and implementation
- Performance monitoring
- Introduce IT help desk
- Training for staff
