IT Strategy to Help Guide Organizational Capabilities

This IDC Perspective seeks to establish clear guidance for the development of an IT strategy that aligns with business goals, reduces tech debt, and helps establish guardrails for increasing and coordinating operational capabilities across the enterprise. Defining an IT strategy can be a daunting task. CIOs and other technology leaders tasked with identifying the overall strategy can find it difficult to cut through the competing priorities of business goals, operational stability, technology maintenance, and integration of new capabilities. Without a comprehensive IT strategy, technological silos can emerge that will increase costs, create duplication of effort across disparate departments, and increase technical debt. "A well-defined IT strategy becomes the North Star for an organization that reduces friction across the enterprise while building capabilities in support of strategic company goals," says Dr. Ken Knapton, adjunct research advisor, IDC's IT Executive Program (IEP). "Balancing IT strategy with operational stability while reducing tech debt and establishing guardrails for technology purchases is a daunting undertaking that yields significant corporate ROI."