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Strategic IT Planning Toolkit – Section 6: Strategy Development
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6 Strategy Development
This section shows how IT strategies and more concrete objectives can be developed for the various
elaborated goals during the Strategic IT Framework activity. This activity starts with an analysis of
the strength, weaknesses, opportunities and strength of the agency with respect to each of the goals
characterizing the strategic perspectives. Next it develops strategies to implement these goals,
leverage opportunities and strength while addressing weaknesses and threats. IT strategies are refined
into more specific objectives with measurable outcomes and with the relationship between the
objectives specified.
6.1 SWOT Analysis
Description: Based on the information gathered from the Strategic IT Framework and IT capability
assessment exercises, this task aims to analyze the IT situation at the agency. It identifies the
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats related to the attainment of the IT goals for the
agency. Strengths are factors (positive) that can support the agency in achieving its goals, for instance
experienced and motivated staff, possession of advanced skill, availability of resources. Weaknesses
are factors that could prevent the agency in achieving its goal, for instance, poor leadership, shortage
of funds, ill motivated staff. Strength and weaknesses correspond to opportunities and threats when
extraneous factors are considered. For instance, an opportunity for achieving an IT goal could result
from the availability of a government-wide PKI infrastructure. An example of a possible threat to IT
goal such as provision of e-services could be poor e-literacy level of the society. In addition to
eliciting SWOT factors for each of the goals (across all perspectives), possible interaction among
these factors are analyzed (say strength and opportunities or weaknesses and threats) is also carried
out. The main inputs for this task are the IT assessment results and the IT strategic framework. Output
is a clear specification of the SWOT items for goals and (ii) result of the analysis of the SWOT
factors.
Process: The following steps could be carried out to elicit and analyze the SWOT factors:
T1) organizing participants into groups
T2) enumerating SWOT factors for goals over all strategic perspectives
T3) consolidating SWOT factors for each perspective
T4) analyzing SWOT factors
Figure 14 shows the process model for this task. Tasks T2 and T3 are repeated over the strategic IT
perspectives identified earlier.
Tools: Section 5.6 through 5.8 of the Template document [33] provides forms to support the
enumeration of general SWOT factors for the strategic perspectives and specific SWOT factors for
selected IT goals.
Related Tasks: This task relies on the outcomes of the IT assessment and strategic IT framework
activities. Its output provides the basis for the strategy development task.
Comments: The depth of the analysis of the SWOT factors determines the effectiveness of the
emerging strategy. A commonly neglected aspect of analysis is the study of the interaction between
counterpart positive and negative factors (i.e. strength and opportunities versus weaknesses and
threats).
Report No. 417, May 2009
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