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

Strategic IT Planning Toolkit – Section 4: Strategic Framework
30
Tools: Section 3.3 of the Template document [33] provides a table for capturing the IT mission
elements and specific functions for validating the IT vision.
Related Tasks: The IT vision is constrained by the mission of the IT organization. For instance, the IT
vision must be achievable within the agreed mission for the IT organization.
Comments: Revision of mission and functions of internal units of agencies may be subject to approval
by higher authorities such as Secretaries and could be time consuming. To avoid this constraint, it is
important that any revision made must not exceed the granted competences of the unit. Thus, a
pragmatic approach to revision of the mission or functions of units is to take such revisions as
“operational” or “administrative” and not formal. Thus, the official or approved mission or functions
still holds while the modified or revised version is used for the exercise.
4.3 Establishing IT Vision
Description: The IT Vision sets the desirable outcomes for the use of IT in the agency to support
organizational vision and goals. Guided by the IT mission, the strategy team and stakeholders
brainstorm in a workshop-style session to articulate a vision for IT. The input to this task is the IT
mission, organizational goals and major business information requirements from business units. The
output from the task is a set of agreed IT vision statements. It is important that the resultant vision is
shared amongst stakeholders.
Process: The following steps are involved in this process:
T1) organizing workshop participants into brainstorming groups
T2) getting individual contributions within teams
T3) consolidating individual contributions within teams
T4) presenting vision statements from teams
T5) agreeing on major IT vision elements across teams
T6) drafting final IT vision statement
Process described in Figure 11 shows that a team leader is selected to facilitate the workings of each
discussion or brainstorming group.
Tools: Section 3.4 of Template document [33] contains a table to document the major elements of the
IT vision under five areas: Organizational mission and programs, Core business processes, IT
processes, IT enabled innovation and learning, IT resources.
Related Tasks: The vision statement produced in task is the major input for the IT Goal Setting Task.
Comments: The IT visioning process must be designed to be participatory and should ensure that
resultant vision is agreed or shared among all participating stakeholders. Team composition should
include members from different backgrounds within the agency to have a near complete perspective
of the entire agency within each of the teams. A few common principles could also be adopted to
guide the overall visioning exercise. For instance, the IT vision should consider issues relating to:
strong partnerships and alliances with other agencies and vendors; leveraging resources and
information; customer-oriented and continuing service process improvements; cost-effectiveness;
return on investment, and business process improvements and consistent policies and standards, using
commonly accepted professional tools and practices to improve quality and efficiency; and attracting
and retaining the most qualified professional staff.
Report No. 417, May 2009
UNU-IIST, P. O. Box 3058, Macao