One Mind’s IT Strategic Masterplanning service provides a number of important benefits for customers looking to develop and document an IT strategic masterplan for the entire company on a time horizon of 2 to 5 years.
One Mind has a comprehensive approach to review and develop IT strategic masterplans. Specifically, we:
The process is sufficiently flexible to consider your specific issues as well as market influences that may affect strategic decisionmaking. And the process is repeatable, such that it can be used to refresh your strategic plan in the future.
One Mind’s IT strategic planning process consists of nine steps grouped into three phases:
1.1 Review current situation
The first step of discovery is to understand the issues and challenges in your current business and IT environment that the IT strategic plan is required to address. This is done from a financial and nonfinancial perspective. The nonfinancial perspective provides insight into the realities of current arrangements from business, operating and commercial aspects. The financial perspective provides the base case IT spend profile against which the impact of new potential strategies is assessed.
1.2 Identify business drivers
Your strategic direction drives and influences the type of IT services required. The new strategy must be able to deliver these required IT services. Therefore, we need to understand the considerations that stem from your corporate strategy which the IT strategy must address.
These considerations are used as a basis to evaluate how well potential strategy and solution options would meet the strategic imperatives of your organization.
1.3 Conduct needs analysis
A key objective of a strategy is to ensure that IT services can effectively support business objectives.
During this step, we identify the essential business, technology and operational requirements of IT services that must be fulfilled in order for your stakeholders and the enterprise to meet their business objectives. The results of the needs analysis are used as a basis to evaluate how well potential options would meet these identified requirements of your enterprise.
1.4 Conduct environmental scan
The environmental scan allows us to understand the external activities and trends that may influence the type of IT model you should adopt and the decisions it should undertake. Specifically, implications of changes in the nature and structure of the IT supply market, sourcing preferences and the industry sector landscape will help guide the IT strategy to ensure that it is current, pragmatic and consistent with industry best practice.
The first step of the analyze phase synthesizes the criteria by which potential strategy options are to be evaluated. The decision criteria are formulated from the identified business drivers and IT needs (from Phase 1:Discover). Some criteria will be relevant for all IT services while others may be specific to a particular service. In addition, for those options identified as meeting these criteria, a further financial evaluation is undertaken as part of 2.3 Select options.
2.2 Generate options
Next we identify the realistic options that will help you achieve your strategy objectives. The options are based on the outcomes of 1.1 Review current situation, 1.4 Conduct environmental scan and 2.1 Determine decision criteria.
Options generation is fundamentally an assessment of key questions, including:
2.3 Select options
Evaluating the options identified during 2.2 Generate options against the defined decision criteria is the final analysis step. The financial implications of preferred options are also assessed here. The key output of this step is a recommendation as to the options that would be most suitable to form part of the new strategy.
Defining the strategy integrates all of the information gathered during discovery and analysis into the strategy recommendation. Specifically, the case or rationale for change is described and the implications are outlined from a benefits, risk and operational perspective.
3.2 Prepare implementation roadmap
The implementation roadmap identifies the critical issues that need to be addressed as part of the implementation planning and the timetable in which they will be answered. This information would subsequently be used by the implementation team to develop the overall implementation plan.
back