The Executive’s Guide to Information Technology, Second Edition

Chapter 4. IT Scope and Strategy

	However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
	--Winston Churchill[1]

	A pragmatist . . . turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power.
	--William James[2]

IT scope and strategy are inextricably linked topics. It is impossible to set a strategic plan for IT and participate in the overall strategy of the organization, without having a clear definition of the scope of activity and responsibilities of the IT department. This chapter is focused on outlining that scope. The chapter also covers IT strategic priorities. This is a different discipline than strategic planning, which is typically done in conjunction with the entire organization. It will be dependent on overall organization plans and goals, and will be highly specific to the organization and IT department. Instead, there are a number of strategic issues within all IT departments that should be understood and managed by the CIO. We cover those here. Finally, this chapter discusses the utilization of various IT-industry strategic methodologies such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and IT Service Management (ITSM).

Why This Topic Is Important

Building a model of the major components that compose an IT department and identifying ...