1. Business-Aligned IT Strategy Deck – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to properly align with the business, achieve IT excellence, and drive technology innovation.
Align with the business by creating an IT strategy that documents the business context, key initiatives, and a strategic roadmap. To create a business-aligned IT strategy, you must understand what the business does and what the business will need. Only then can a carefully thought-out, strategic and tactical plan be created for execution.
This storyboard will help you build your IT mission and vision statements and IT guiding principles, elicit business context from the CIO and the IT team, identify your key initiatives and build their profiles, construct your strategic roadmap, and evaluate your governance structures, budget, and organizational changes.
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Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy – Phases 1-4
2. Business Context Interview Guide – An interview guide to help you elicit the business context by interviewing business leaders and peers.
Use this template as a starting point to interview your business leaders to elicit the business context. The goal of the interviews is to extract business goals, organizational priorities, and business initiatives that will play a critical role in building your IT strategy. Meet with your executive team and work with them to identify essential knowledge.
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Business Context Interview Guide
3. IT Presentation Template – A best-of-breed template to help you build a clear, concise, and compelling strategy document for stakeholders.
This presentation template uses sample data from “Acme Corp” to demonstrate an ideal IT strategy. Use this template to document your final strategy outputs including executive-facing business alignment and strategy highlights, key initiatives and summaries, strategic roadmap, budget proposal, IT goals and operating model, functional project roadmaps, and year-in-review data to highlight IT success stories.
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IT Strategy Presentation Template
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Strategy-on-a-Page Template
4. IT Strategy Workbook – A structured tool to help you prioritize IT strategy activities and build a roadmap to ensure success.
This tool guides an IT department in planning and prioritization activities to build an effective IT strategy. This Excel workbook guides you through making key decisions regarding the visuals that should be incorporated into your final presentation document. Key activities include building a goals cascade visual that shows the relationships between business and IT goals, initiatives, and capabilities; prioritizing key initiatives using a balanced scorecard approach; and building the IT strategy roadmap using a Gantt chart visual to showcase project execution timelines.
