IT Strategic Planning Discover Playbook
Conduct your IT environmental scan and SWOT analysis and cascade your strategic goals to support IT activities
Active work on an IT strategic plan begins with a scan of the external environment and a review of institutional priorities. Systematically evaluating these factors sets the groundwork for a strategic plan based on shared facts and assumptions, and ensures that IT strategic planning working groups give appropriate weight to environmental and institutional needs.
IT strategic planning working groups should conduct an environmental scan and an analysis of IT strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). Completing the first four steps outlined below will result in an analysis of trends that may impact the IT organization and institution, documentation of campus IT needs and IT perception on campus, an understanding of what skills are currently prevalent in IT staff, and a summary SWOT matrix.
In conjunction with the environmental scan, IT strategic planning working groups should follow steps 5-6 below to ensure that the IT strategic plan is aligned with the institutional strategic plan and other campus priorities. Exercises in this playbook help workshop participants identify IT activities related to campus goals, and begin to group those activities into categories that will feed further development of the IT strategic plan.
Step 1: External scan
Establishing a context for strategic planning requires IT strategic plan working group members and other participants to document strategically significant external technology and market factors and the threats and opportunities each poses to the IT organization and institution. Tools in the playbook offer a guide to ensure consistent and holistic assessment across evaluators, as they identify and consider each of these factors.
Step 2: Institutional scan
Understanding the environment the IT organization serves—the institution—should also inform the IT strategic plan. This toolkit offers frameworks to collect information about institutional IT needs through listening tours and satisfaction surveys and also services that distributed IT units provide.
Step 3: Internal scan
To accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of the IT organization in the IT strategic planning process, working groups should audit the current skillset of IT staff and systematically evaluate IT capabilities. Worksheets in this section support the design and completion of a skills audit, and provide a review structure to capture strategically significant strengths and weaknesses across 31 IT capabilities.
Step 4: SWOT Matrix
After gathering inputs from the External, Institutional, and Internal Scan Toolkits, the SWOT Matrix Toolkit helps selected participants, organize the data from each of these exercises into a framework that will inform the IT strategic plan. Handouts for distribution during a workshop will solicit community input on the environment within which IT operates, and inform the IT strategic planning working group’s efforts to create an IT strategic plan.
Step 5: Find institutional strategic goals
Typically, institutional strategic goals and objectives can be found in an institutional strategic plan. Where there is no institutional strategic plan, or the plan is outdated, the IT strategic planning working group must turn to other mechanisms to identify institutional strategic priorities. This step outlines alternative sources of information to infer institutional strategic goals and objectives.
Step 6: Conduct goals cascade
Once an IT strategic planning working group has articulated institutional strategic goals, they need to consider the IT implications of those goals. Through a facilitated conversation, IT strategic planning workshop participants map IT activities needed to further each goal.
During the same workshop, participants also start to sort the identified IT activities into broad categories. These activity categories give the IT strategic planning working group a point of origin for identifying IT strategic goals in the next phase of the planning process.
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Step 7: Refine IT strategic activity categories
Using the draft categories identified in by the workshop participants, IT strategic planning working group members review the environmental scan and SWOT analysis completed in Steps 1-4 to identify any strategically significant IT activities overlooked during Steps 5-6. They will use that additional information to refine the IT activity categories before beginning the process to identify IT strategic goals and objectives.
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