A good IT planning process can ensure that decisions taken will be effective because decision-makers will have all the relevant information at hand, including comprehensive information on the IT landscape. In this way, CIOs will be able to make decisions that are both cost-effective and help organizations achieve their strategic objectives.

1. Devising a Workable IT Planning Strategy
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Share This Article By Erik Masing
ShareThis Effective decisions are elusive without good planning abilities - and decisions about how IT should
be deployed and managed are no different.
Search the Site When are these decisions made? And what makes them effective? IT supports core business
processes (indeed in some industries, IT is the core business process) improving competitive
advantage, decreasing time-to-market, increasing customer value, enhancing the customer
experience and empowering workers with information.
Search But the application landscape is extremely complex with old technologies entangled with the new.
The accelerated pace of business means that necessary changes to business processes because
of mergers and acquisitions, new branches, new service and product lines, new IT systems,
regulatory requirements and the like, need to be decided upon more quickly.
So how do you ensure that decisions taken will be effective in the face of these and other
challenges? The decision-maker must have all the relevant information at hand - and it must be
Free Subscription to IT current and presented in a consistent format. A good IT planning process can deliver this - it must,
Today though, include comprehensive information on the IT landscape. For too long, IT planning has been
Enter E-mail Address: an exercise in number-crunching, too shallow in its consideration of the impact to the architecture,
forcing economical decisions that don't achieve desired results.
Consistent decision-making requires a defined framework, methodology or, in short, process. So if
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IT planning consists of all of the activities that support consistent decision-making, then the IT
planning discipline has to be made up of activities performed in a process that is repeatable, has
Powered by defined responsibilities, has a defined order to the activities and is auditable. To make quality
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decisions, the process should provoke the right questions and supply the information that can
support the decision-making.
ERP for the IT
Business solved this problem for the business side of the enterprise long ago with enterprise
resource planning. ERP brings together the relevant people, processes, tools and information to
create an information-based, process-centric information platform on which to base decisions. It
stipulates a uniform methodology that is shared across stakeholders, which is key to collaboration
and enablement of decision-making.
Consider the answers to some questions CIO must obtain in order to make effective decisions:
What projects do I have running now?
Which projects are planned?
What business initiatives and strategy are they in support of?
Which projects can I kill without adversely impacting my strategic route and progress and
how much will I save?
No large company today would be able to compete without a strong ERP system that drives and
integrates business processes, building and maintaining a high-quality information base for making
business decisions. IT planning requires the same approach: a centralized information base that is
fed by integrated processes, updated with every plan made and every decision taken. This allows
for accurate information to be provided to stakeholders at the time of decision-making.
The IT Planning Dynamic Duo: Process and Information
IT planning is not about drawing static pictures of various architecture states and then frequently
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2. Devising a Workable IT Planning Strategy
redrawing them to keep up with re-planning requirements. It's about being on top of architecture
change: capturing the state of each individual architecture element (operational, in development or
planned), managing the changes to these states and ensuring that the changes are transparent to
all stakeholders as they are being made.
This demonstrates the importance of process and information - and the necessity for their
integration with each other. Whereas the documentation of the current architecture is important and
can often show redundancies in which savings can be made, the "as-is" situation is not really the
problem. And whereas it's important to have a plan on how to achieve the target architecture, this is
also not the problem. The problem is the coordination of the 20 - 200 transformational projects that
are being planned at one time - as is the situation in any large enterprise. This is magnified by the
desire to run various scenarios for each of these transformational projects during the course of
planning, assessment and decision-making.
The IT Planning Framework
So what activities encompass IT planning, what aspects of the enterprise are the foci of the
activities and what processes integrate the activities into a collaborative process that will create an
information base to support effective and consistent decisions for deploying and managing IT?
There are four aspects of the enterprise that determine what IT will be implemented and thus need
to be balanced across the planning process:
1. Demand and strategy
2. Enterprise architecture
3. Program portfolio
4. Cost and budgets
Demand and strategy provide direction for IT. By linking business goals with the IT that
supports them, or is needed to support them, IT's mandate becomes clear. Identifying and
managing this relationship is critical for being able to make the right decisions on what changes
need to be made to the IT landscape to drive business improvements.
Enterprise architecture is crucial. IT planning has to be architecture-based because it is the
enterprise architecture that delivers the building plans for IT - which artifacts will be used, what is
their purpose and how they relate to each other. Enterprise architecture is necessary for
understanding the intrinsic dependency of the IT/business relationship -- for example, the
dependency between business capabilities and services.
Program portfolio delivers the plan of action for IT. Key to the effectiveness of program portfolio
management is the seamless integration with enterprise architecture management processes so that
architectural risk is minimized and opportunities to migrate, enhance or retire current applications or
other IT artifacts are not ignored.
Cost and budgets provide the range in which IT change needs to be carried out. Cost
management needs to be conducted with an awareness of the enterprise architecture and project
portfolio. In doing so, it allow enterprises to map their budgets to value-producing IT components
and transformational initiatives.
Process Lends Structure to IT Planning Activities
Planning activities key to the planning process can be broken down into basically three main
process categories
1. Strategy management
2. Enterprise architecture management
3. IT Planning.
Strategy management works under the premise that understanding business strategy is the
key to an aligned IT. Primary activities include the following:
Operationalize the business strategy: Strategic intentions of the enterprise are typically defined at
very high levels of abstraction. They are not readily relatable to the discussions and activities in the
enterprise architecture. Yet architectural considerations are an important part of any strategic
transformational program. Enterprise architecture's (EA) role has expanded from defining technology
standards to include planning for business applications and services. As such it is important to
establish a framework and process that are going to allow it to work with the business to define
business goals and requirements in a way that removes any room for interpretation.
Such a framework supports:
Definition of business strategy down to a level that can be translated into specific changes to
the EA in general and the business architecture in particular thus ensuring business validity
of EA actions
The ability to link to business capabilities at a business function level
Bottom-up definition of IT's own strategic plan
Governance and management processes in business and IT
The project portfolio review process by providing a more precise business context
Assess current and future business capabilities: To be confident in the enterprise's ability to achieve
its business strategy, the organization needs to ensure that required capabilities exist and these in
the required quality. Many organizations use business capability management to assess this.
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3. Devising a Workable IT Planning Strategy
Business capabilities prescribe a view of the enterprise based on business activities that are
independent of specific business processes and organizational silos. An enterprise can use them to
identify which business activities are critical to enterprise success and which need improvement
most urgently.
Agree and communicate the IT strategy: The gap analysis on the basis of the business capability
assessment can now be turned into IT's own strategic plan to steer project assessment and portfolio
decision-making. The IT master plan is the ideal tool for this, describing the tactical plan to achieve
the IT strategy starting from the IT planning baseline and focusing everyone on one common plan
of action. It defines the incremental steps or milestones bridging from the as-is landscape to the
target landscape defined in the IT strategy. Each incremental step is associated with prospective
realization time periods and approval statuses.
Enterprise architecture management secures IT's ability to support the business. The
primary activities include the following:
Impact analysis: An important element in implementing the technology strategy is understanding the
impact of proposed changes and understanding these early on so as to avoid surprises half-way
through an implementation. This improves predictability and reliability in the overall IT plan and also
serves to control risk.
IT weakness and cost-driver analysis: Analyzing for cost inefficiencies, architectural risk, non-
compliance and the general health status of the IT landscape is necessary to ensure that IT can
deliver and improve on its support for business initiatives. Assessing the risk entailed in the EA is a
key element of the IT management process. The analysis of the applications that support certain
business processes is an important feed for the overall risk assessment. Targeted portfolio analysis
gives users quick insight into the risk exposure of applications and allows them to initiate mitigation
appropriately.
Technology life-cycle planning: In IT, standards are set in order to ensure that the IT landscape
makes continual progress towards the enterprise's architectural vision and is in step with new
technologies. The enterprise architect continually searches for opportunities to streamline processes
across federated environments by defining standard components and pre-configuring these into
standard platforms to be used as the base platform for individual projects. Continual research of the
existing environment for upgrade potential is necessary to rid IT of out-dated, inefficient
technologies.
Process-based IT planning leads to defensible investment decisions. And this is where the
strength of IT planning becomes obvious - in its ability to capture and deliver all relevant information
on several solution planning projects in a real-time manner. In a "demand-to-budget" process, all
demands and projects are thoroughly evaluated as to their support for IT and business strategy,
architectural viability, business case, implementation effort, technology and architecture risks,
overlap with other initiatives and impact.
Demand consolidation: The business analyst can see demands from all areas of the enterprise and
assess these as to redundancy or possible synergy with each other. Also demands are analyzed for
their compliance with business goals and strategies and their possible impact to the architecture
(current and future).
Architectural due diligence: Those demands worthy of further consideration go on to the next step in
the process which is creating alternative solution architectures, taking into account defined
standards and impact to the current and future architectures. As in demand consolidation, with
information on other planning projects and their planned or envisioned artifacts (or retirement of an
artifact), solution architects can be confident that the solutions they are proposing are based on
current and reliable information on the state of the architecture at the time of implementation.
Project portfolio selection and monitoring: With business cases and resource estimates as part of
the proposals, projects are now ready to be evaluated in the context of the rest of the portfolio.
Projects are prioritized and budgets allocated for IT investment. Prioritization is based not only on
financial metrics but also considers strategy alignment, viability of the proposed architecture, and
architectural and implementation risk. During this whole process the data arising out of the demand-
to-budget process will be committed to the inventory for everyone else involved in planning in their
enterprise domain to see and be aware of. Most importantly, the data committed to the inventory is
associated in its different planned states (envisioned, planned, operational) to certain points in time.
Collaboration: Though most business managers inherently know that well-orchestrated teams can
have a dramatic impact on the success of a business, organizations often struggle to create and
execute the IT plan because this work involves tight coordination of decision makers with diverse
interests, budgets and reporting lines, especially between the IT organization and business
divisions. Given the complexity, collaboration is a necessity to ensure transparency and accelerated
productivity in project planning cycles.
Three pre-requisites need to be met in order to plan and manage an organization's IT so that it can
optimally support the business: access to all architecturally-relevant data, well-defined processes to
avoid redundant efforts and ensure seamless interaction between users involved in the process,
and involvement of and communication between all relevant stakeholders.
Summary
A good IT planning process can ensure that decisions taken will be effective because decision-
makers will have all the relevant information at hand, including comprehensive information on the IT
http://www.ittoday.info/Articles/IT_Planning_Strategy.htm[3/28/2010 8:51:12 PM]

4. Devising a Workable IT Planning Strategy
landscape. In this way, CIOs will be able to make decisions that are both cost-effective and help
organizations achieve their strategic objectives.
About the Author
Erik Masing is co-founder and CEO of alfabet, a strategic IT planning and management software
provider. He has received numerous awards of distinction for business innovation. In 2000, he
received an "Elite of the Future" award by the German Economist magazine and in 2001 he was
won the Ernst & Young "Entrepreneur of the Year" award.
© Copyright 2009 Auerbach Publications
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