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

Strategic IT Planning Toolkit – Section 10: Conclusions
53
10 Conclusions
This toolkit was developed to assist public or government organizations in building their IT strategies
through a rigorous but practical process. A major goal of the toolkit is to facilitate the development of
a balanced IT strategy well aligned to agency organizational goals. The toolkit does not presume any
specific technical capability and therefore subsumes technicalities of the underlying methodology
elements – for instance the use of balanced scorecard. It presented the processes for implementing the
major planning activities: Planning, Strategic Framework, Assessment, Strategy Development,
Strategy Implementation, Strategy Control and Documentation. Cross references are provided in the
toolkit to the appropriate sections of a companion Template Document [33] that could be used by the
strategy team to execute specific planning tasks.
While the government as a whole could adopt the prescribed processes as standards for Strategic IT
Planning, individual agencies could customize the processes based on size and need. As a government
standard, agencies could submit their IT strategies developed based on the standard in some fixed
format for consolidation by government. A government-wide view on IT development enables
effective coordination, identification of cross-agency initiatives, opportunities for economies of scale
and standardization of the IT environment across government. For instance, if 50% of government
agencies indicate document management as priority initiative, a cross-agency project team could be
setup to facilitate the implementation of the initiatives at the different agencies with additional
benefits of experience and expertise sharing, as well as economies of scale.
By standardizing the strategic IT planning process, government is better able to track the alignment of
initiatives to its critical programs such as those related to public service reform and electronic
government development. By design, the prescribed process models guarantee the development of e-
government through explicit IT support for the delivery of public services.
The toolkit does not provide exhaustive information on strategic IT planning for public organizations.
However, it provides detailed enough information to guarantee the development of a balanced IT
strategy for government agencies. Information on other IT strategy development tools is provided in
Appendix A.
Report No. 417, May 2009
UNU-IIST, P. O. Box 3058, Macao