Should the CEO of a SME be as interested in a IT strategy as the CEO of a massive corporate? Does it help a business if there's a sound IT strategy in place? What exactly is the point of an IT strategy?
I believe every business can benefit from having an IT strategy, but only if that IT strategy is aligned to the business objectives. A CIO I worked for had the following strategy: "Make sure that IT supports whatever the revenue driving business units do." At the time, I thought that this sounded like a pretty awful excuse for a strategy, but over time I've come to appreciate what he meant and in the end agree with him. It provides a very decent generic IT strategy for any business big or small although I would now add something with the addition of "...and strive to do it for less without compromising quality." At the time, my CIO was in the fortunate position of having money thrown at his department - cost-saving piece was not on his radar - this was the man who would happily buy Alienware laptops as business tools.
Anyway, I digress. A strategy that says "Make sure that IT supports whatever the revenue driving business units do and strives to do it for less without compromising quality" is a strategy that should work in any company, big or small. The bigger organisations can afford someone, maybe whole departments, to drive this strategy, but for most smaller companies they won't have anyone who can devise and make this strategy a reality even though they desperately need it. Sure, many of them utilise third party companies to support and deliver their IT, but are they really going to be interested in helping their customer drive down IT costs when it will directly affect their bottom line? Probably not, and so the SMEs bumble along with their IT costing what it does, not really adding value to the bottom line, once more the necessary evil.
Now that technology is so central to doing business, an IT strategy is important to every company, big or small. The tough bit is getting the right person or persons to deliver it, particularly if you're an SME.
2 comments:
Hmmm.. but for the SME, and I would argue also for larger organizations, senior management has to be more directly engaged in IT decisions. It's less effective to try and handoff the strategic thinking, even if you can find the "right person."
Consider the circa 2003 yet still relevant advice from Harvard Business Review - Six Decisions IT Shouldn't Make: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3237.html
IT strategy in isolation is less than useless, in fact it can be downright dangerous.
Engagement with the business units or senior management is very important, they must be the stakeholders.
Finding someone who has the necessary skills to create and drive the IT strategy is where I believe a lot of non-technical SMEs will struggle.
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