Building Effective IT Strategy - part 3

In our last two post on IT Strategy, we highlighted how Strategy can be structured, how it differs fro Tactics (although we will explore that in more depth in this post) and how to employ a consistent process towards developing strategy. The first two steps involved determining what the core strategic approach might be; the second focused on goal-setting. The third and most difficult part is assigning actions to goals...

So, using our Big Data case study, how would begin to translate the higher level goals into definitive actions and then what types of tactics might be used to carry out those actions?

This illustration highlights where Big Data fits within a larger set of Strategic elements in an overall Transformation initiative. This type of representation helps to define relationships, dependencies and quantifies where work needs to happen once the higher level goal-setting has been defined.  

The types of actions that might be involved with actualizing a Big Data Strategy might include the following:

• Creation of a team or center of excellence to manage the technology / project
• Definition and Deployment of a proof of concept 
• Acquisition of the raw data intended for use in the Big Data solution (so let's say this is for an energy company it might include SmartGrid sensor information).
• Acquisition and / or development of the Big Data Platform

All of these possible actions of course imply a number of key decisions that must be made; the following are a few examples of those;

• Determination of Big Data technology to use (triple store, key value etc.)
• Determination / selection of a Big Data solution hardware platform
• Determination of modeling or data profiling approach
• Choice of BI platform for data visualization

All of this information is going to be necessary in order to complete detailed roadmaps and ensure accurate estimates for those who manage the IT portfolio process in any given organization. Actions can then begin to be translated into milestones with traceable costs. Those Action-Milestones are then mapped specifically to goals/objectives previously identified in the higher level strategy.

Now, how does action to goal alignment involve Tactics? In the case we've introduced and in most others, the tactics involve the core tools for decision-making. So, for all of the decisions listed above, individual analyses of alternatives might be conducted. For product decisions, run-offs / competitions / evaluations and source selection processes are applied. For design considerations, an architecture approach is applied. All of these activities can also fit within a lifecycle process - all of this represents Tactics.  Why? because, we could use roughly the same lifecycle approaches for any type of technology - whether it is UAV development, Quantum Computing or building a SharePoint portal. It is the interchangeable actualization toolset for all strategy.

The hardest part of aligning Strategy, sub-strategies and tactics is when you find yourself in a very large transformation effort (one perhaps dealing with 100's of systems, dozens of technologies and perhaps thousands of people). There is no single solution, tool or approach for managing that - it represents what mathematicians often refer to as a unsolvable problem (NP Hard). We will look at IT Transformation and intense complexity in an upcoming post.


Copyright 2014, Stephen Lahanas


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