Accomodate Growth

Strategic IT Planning is a must and is affordable for all companies

“Strategy” is defined as a long-term plan for success or a synchronized integrated approach to achieving objectives. As such, the basics to strategy planning is thus a matter of getting from point A to point B.

Point A being the present circumstances and environment and point B being the desired future. Strategy planning is thus the space in-between and wherein requires vision, leadership, research and risk analyses. Steering the business vehicle will extensively impact on all its business processes and infrastructure and thus, has to be done with finesse.

Different strokes for different folks but …

Depending on who you ask – the people in corporate, IT, marketing or Research & Development  – the term success is defined differently between them. Regardless of how they define it individually, as a whole, the strategic plan has to be integrated, in synch and have key drivers at the helm.

At the business level, more often than not, the strategies are about growing the company, beating the competition, streamlining business and work processes and scoping the technology needs of the company say 5 years on.

While with IT, their strategies are likely to center on infrastructure needs, capacity, security, disaster planning, backup facilities and other similar areas aligned with the business plan.

Traditionally, it was sufficient for the strategic IT plan to follow in the coat tails of the corporate business plan. With technology and the Web morphing at exponential rates, adhering to that model would find the most well-meaning of IT plans fairly obsolete by the time they are up and running. And that is why nowadays, the IT team lead or Chief Information Officer (CIO) in the larger companies, have a permanent seat at the strategic planning table.

Emergence of the Social Web bodes well for SMB Strategic IT Planning

What if you are a small to medium-sized company without an in-house IT team?  What are your options?

Fortunately, the emergence of the Web has bode well for even the smallest of business operations. There are external CIO’s you can align and partner with to get the big solutions for your not so big but growing operations.

Local companies like well-established legal practice Von Doussas did just that. (add links)

With Von Doussas, it was a no-brainer to keep apace of changing times and tap into newer technologies in order to stay ahead of their industry. Their director, who admits to being critical,  got in touch with Knowledge Plus IT and work out a tailored unique business solution to suit their specific strategic IT and business needs.

The unavoidable buzzwords of our Social Web era are customer service excellence, connectivity, collaboration using integrated platforms, infrastructure and virtualization. The Strategic IT Planning of any thriving enterprise can only ignore them at their peril.