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

Strategic IT Planning Toolkit – Section 6: Strategy Development
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Figure 15: Strategy Development Process
Comments: The task is the kernel of the strategy development exercise. However, as the process
specifies, the visioning and goal setting sessions as well as the capability assessment exercise provide
foundation for this task. The strategy development process is iterative and incremental as the
introduction of a strategy may necessitate the inclusion of other required or supporting strategies.
Thus, for completeness, the consequences of the strategies should be checked. Strategy development
in general is a complex process which requires sophisticated and subtle human thinking [28]. As
discussed in Section 2, there are other approaches to strategy development than SWOT analysis.
However SWOT analysis remains one of the most popular techniques.
6.3 Specifying Objectives
Description: This tasks aims to operationalize the developed strategies. To operationalize the
strategies effectively, there is the need to refine or further break down the high level strategies and
specify performance measures and possibly the target to attain. Specifically, objectives translate
strategic priorities (which are often vague) into directional and action-oriented statements of what
must be done to execute strategy. Objectives are translated into performance measures. The major
input for this is the developed IT strategy while the output consists of (i) concrete objectives for major
strategies under the different strategic perspectives, and (ii) performance measures for each objective.
Process: the following steps are prescribed for refining strategies into concrete objectives:
T1) prioritize the IT strategies
T2) determine specific actions for each priority strategy across perspectives
T3) specify performance measures for each objective
T4) compile objectives with corresponding performance measures under each perspective
Report No. 417, May 2009
UNU-IIST, P. O. Box 3058, Macao