Strategic Planning for Information Technology Essay

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Pages: 14

Strategic Planning for Information Technology

Executive Summary Strategic planning for information technology is one component of an overall company vision for success. This analysis enables IT professionals to successfully define short and long-term goals and discover the resources necessary to realize such goals. To ensure success, the strategic plan should be developed in a thorough but rapid manner, consist of a brief, succinct compilation of analyzed data, and provide opportunities by which additional planning and analysis can occur. Several important benefits occur as the result of a successful strategic IT plan. First, employees are provided with an understanding of how their role fits in with the overall company
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The world will not stand still to wait for completion of the planning process. Companies need to balance time invested in strategic planning with the pace of their competitors in the market place. While the end result of strategic planning may be a succinct document based upon hard, quantitative data, the creation of this may actually exclude important details. Qualitative information and subtle nuances experienced only by those immersed in the daily and sometimes seemingly mundane details of the business, and typically not by senior level management, can provide rich and invaluable contributions to the real-life success of the plan. However, since time is a critical factor in the implementation of any new technology, these details must often be overlooked. A third shortcoming of strategic planning lies in the formalization of the process itself. While formally developed systems provide the means to process hard information, they are incapable of the human abilities to internalize, comprehend, and synthesize. IT professionals should avoid the trap of sole reliance upon the strategy itself to accomplish goals and rather use it as a framework by which further creative discovery and planning can occur. In other words, a formalized strategic plan does not guarantee success. Creative human input is necessary to translate the plan into