IT Strategy

I’m working on some resources designed to help small community groups figure out what to do with technology. One of the aspects is strategic plans. I’ve read a lot of them, and most of them are shit. Really. A strategic plan (technology-related or not) should be short enough that everyone in the organisation can read and understand it. It should be written in plain language, with drawings and diagrams where needed. 

It sees the world from space, and sees how everything is connected, and what’s likely to be coming down the track. A strategic plan is more about the “why” than the “how”. At its best, it’s visionary. The process that an organisation goes through to end up with this one page of beauty will need to involve lots of process, $500-an-hour-experts, questioning, SWOT tables, visioneering and waving of dead chickens over the ashes of the recently departed, but the result should end up quite simple and probably disarmingly, disappointingly, obvious. That doesn’t make the process any less important. The journey is the reward, grasshopper.

Once the strategic plan is done, the longer, more boring, less understandable piece should happen - which is the operational plan. That’s the bit that explains how the organisation will fulfil the strategic plan. That’s a topic for another blurt, later.