In this newsletter we’ll talk about 3 key steps you can take to improve your IT Strategy.

1) Listen

Actively listening to your stakeholders to understand their concerns and needs is critical to creating a great IT Strategy. Specifically here are 3 things you can do:

• Adopt a “Beginners Mindset” when talking with your stakeholders, so that you are as unencumbered by assumptions and prejudice when engaging

• Practice Active Listening techniques to maximise the value you get from you conversations

• Accept that you might think you know what your IT Strategy needs to be, but the only way you’ll know is through deep engagement with your colleagues

2) Forget about technology for as long as possible

Yeah yeah technology is pretty important in an IT Strategy, but the priority should be on understanding the needs of your customers, stakeholders and business

A good clue is, if you are talking about specific technology decisions in the conversations you have with your stakeholders you are probably not having the right type of conversation and need to rethink.

3) Focus on Capabilities

It is a truism that the pace of technological change is ever increasing, one impact of this is it’s risky to nail your IT Strategy down by focusing on specific technologies. You need to be focusing on building strategic capabilities for your business for the long term, these of course might be instantiated at a point in time by specific technologies or products, but it’s the business capabilities that they deliver that is important. If your strategy is largely regurgitating key technology suppliers product roadmaps, then you may want to rethink whether you are thinking ‘strategically’ about your IT Strategy and whether you’ve challenged yourself enough about how you deliver those strategic business capabilities.

Course, Newsletter and Podcast

In my upcoming How to IT Strategy course, we will go into more detail about how to ensure you create a great IT Strategy. Subscribe to this newsletter for more instalments and to be notified when the course launches