Strategic IT Planning for Public Organizations: A Toolkit - UNU-IIST ...

Strategic IT Planning Toolkit – Section 2: Strategic IT Planning Process
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P1. Strategic alignment – strategies developed through the process should explicitly support
organizational strategies. For instance, IT strategies are expected to support any ongoing reform
and restructuring activities in government organizations. Therefore, resulting IT strategies should
be closely aligned with public sector modernization and reform programs. Alignment necessitates
the involvement of stakeholders that are outside the IT organization in the overall planning
process, particularly participants from the core business and support units within the organizations
as well as other central entities involved in modernization and continuous process improvement.
A strategic alignment process would include Business-IT alignment, IT-Business alignment and
stakeholder analysis.
P2. Avoiding strategy gaps – process should minimize or eliminate the gaps in the resulting strategy.
Strategy gaps created through the absence of supporting or complementary strategies necessary to
realize a strategy. For instance, the absence of strategies to ensure the availability of human and
financial resources in an IT strategy creates a strategy gap. The inclusion of strategic alignment
steps in the overall strategy process significantly reduces strategy gaps. Strategy gaps can also be
reduced by ensuring that dependency relationships between the strategies are explicitly specified
through mappings.
P3. Clear measurement framework – the IT strategy process should produce measurable strategic
objectives with clear specification of measures and targets. The metric allows for the management
and control of strategies during implementation. The various targets associated with the objectives
provide concrete benchmark for the IT organization and a basis for revision of the strategies.
P4. Support for core areas – process must ensure that developed strategies support all the major
aspects of the IT organization, for instance, at least one strategy is expected to be specified for
optimizing financial resources keeping up with technology changes and enabling internal business
units leverage appropriately, supporting the delivery of public services to customers, satisfying
regulatory requirements, improving internal IT processes and developing the structures and
processes for IT governance. In addition to these broad categories, a number of specific issues
considered critical by Chief Information Officers (CIO) have been identified as follows
[24][25][26]:
o Security and risk management – making provision to determine the current level of security,
creating scenarios to deal with uncertainties and mitigating risks. It also includes defining
appropriate security standards for the organization and ensuring business continuity planning.
o Identity management – establishing correct identity of users to enable improved service
delivery, public safety, and interoperability.
o Information management – enable improved management of information and knowledge
sharing within the organization to support knowledge-intensive decision processes and
activities.
o Procurement – establishing an efficient process for acquisition of IT assets, products and
services.
o Integration and interoperability – support the seamless exchange of information between the
agencies in the delivery of one-stop or integrated services.
o Shared services – developing generic services in collaboration with other agencies in
implementing core business patterns.
P5. Foundations for Enterprise Architecture – the process must provide the necessary input and
foundations required to build a comprehensive IT architecture, consisting of specifications of
processes; people; technology – network, hardware and software; and strategic objectives and
values for the organization.
Report No. 417, May 2009
UNU-IIST, P. O. Box 3058, Macao