I stumbled upon a fascinating piece written last month by Patrick Gray over at TechRepublic, ZDNet’s sister site. Essentially, Patrick says “the best IT strategy is no strategy.”
Why? To put it succinctly, an IT strategy is just that, and not the business strategy. As Patrick puts it, IT strategy documents typically have no resonance with business leaders; they are usually “tactical plans detailing various technologies that the company is implementing, considering or watching, and perhaps making a half-hearted connection with what the larger corporation is doing.”
And this zinger:
“If your ’strategy’ document mentions clouds, virtualization, ERP or any commodity operating system, it likely falls into this category, and legitimately is met with little excitement, just as a plan from the CFO detailing the nuances of accounting principles and the novel debits and credits that will be implemented by finance would be met with a resounding thud.”
There’s no strategy that matters except the overall corporate strategy — that’s the strategy that matters. So “throw all the tired talk of alignment out the window.”
Hear hear.
