“There are many organisations that rely massively on an IT strategy that has substance. Equally, there are just as many where a course has been set without the necessary due diligence, care and attention. In other words, they’ve lacked what I would define as a ‘good’ strategy,” stated Phil. “While it’s important to recognise that not all good strategies succeed, the odds are stacked against you when business strategy and IT strategy are not properly aligned, planned and executed.”
Indeed, the results of ‘bad’ strategy are clear to see: migrations that are never fully or successfully executed; failure to meet compliance and security requirements; requirements that are inadvertently invalidated; or a sudden realisation that the services you thought you were getting are not actually what’s being delivered (despite what the supplier had promised).
Phil continued: “All of these issues are borne out of ‘bad’ strategy – an ill-conceived plan, or a wonderfully creative piece of business and IT thinking that goes awry due to the fact that no scientific analysis has been conducted in advance. It’s the art without the science.
“We need to join up our creative thought processes and apply our knowledge of our business, or indeed of Information Technology (that which we have learned and observed) in order to formulate a strategy for our business and for Information Technology. Nowhere more so than in Cloud deployments,” he added.
“Delving into the mysterious world of Cloud strategy and to bring the marriage of art and science to life, let’s do some ‘blue sky’ thinking. A bad strategy may look something like this: ‘We are going to take all of our business into the Cloud’. While that may sound like a plan or a strategy of sorts, it’s a bad one. It’s easy to imagine and create that vision, but where is the application of knowledge and experience? Where’s the systematic science of studying the Information Technology world in taking this approach? How can a business actually achieve this and why would it want to do it? What are the benefits and risks?”
Without asking these types of questions and, more importantly, answering them, we cannot simply make a statement and expect a successful outcome. Without a measurable outcome to benchmark at every step, or the ability to examine whether the course has been set correctly and the feedback mechanisms in place to make corrections along the way, the strategy is doomed to fail.
“Strategy needs to come from the bottom up and not the top down. To gain the insight and to fully understand all of the benefits and all of the risks, one must simply speaking, ask for help. Engage others, internally and externally, but also take responsibility for having a strategy and the planning and execution of it. In fact it’s essential to direct and empower others to deliver. But don’t just come up with an idea and tell everyone else to go do it.
“Ultimately, Cloud strategy means understanding all of the possible outcomes, the risks, the benefits, the opportunity cost and the impact to others and how they feel. A good strategy is one that everyone understands – not only what it is, but also the why, how and when,” he concluded.
