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

Strategic IT Planning Toolkit – Section 3: Planning
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stakeholder’s profile and indicates important criteria to consider when prioritizing stakeholders
interests for the IT strategy process. It also specifies important aspects of a communication plan
suitable for IT strategy process.
Related Tasks: The output from task will guide the composition of the IT strategy team and determine
the sources of information for the rest of the IT Strategy exercise from IT Strategic Framework
activity through IT Capability Assessment to Strategy Development, Strategy Implementation,
Strategy Control activities and Strategy Dissemination activities.
Figure 6: Stakeholder Analysis Process
Comments: The complexity and scope of the IT Strategy exercise plays an important role on the depth
and formality of the implementation process. For instance, in a case where business units are large
and distributed, online questionnaires could be provided for capturing required profile information.
However, in a small agency, direct interaction with stakeholders would definitely be preferred to
obtain such information. Also in communication will be more fluid and easy in small agencies thus
requiring less formal communication plans than in big distributed agencies. Nevertheless, the
stakeholder analysis process is very important in mitigating possible risks arising from conflicts of
interest with respect to stakeholders.
3.3 Forming the Strategy Team
Description: This task constitutes the strategy management team for carrying out the IT strategy
exercise. The team is typically composed of: senior management representative, individuals that
represent the core business units and management of the IT organization. The team’s main
responsibility is to carry out strategy development tasks – collecting and organizing all necessary
information from stakeholders and business units, engaging agency management in strategy sessions,
carrying the necessary environmental assessment tasks, developing concrete strategies and presenting
developed strategies to agency management. The main inputs for forming the strategy team are the
stakeholders’ profile and role produced by the Stakeholder Analysis task. The major output from the
task is a list of IT strategy team members and their respective roles.
Process: This task could be executed with the following sequence of tasks:
T1) short listing team members using stakeholders’ profile and role information
T2) assigning roles to stakeholders within team
Report No. 417, May 2009
UNU-IIST, P. O. Box 3058, Macao