"A lot of strategic plans are as thick as a phone book and go down to an incredible amount of detail, and to me, burying yourself in that level of detail is just a waste of resources. Also, no one's going to read a big document in an organisation this size [there are approximately 140 people in the ABA] and if you want people to participate in this, it needs to be something at a summary level they can understand. So we put out a brief just to chart our overall strategic directions."
Shannon found that was a challenge in itself, though, for most consultants, who he says have a very detailed view of what a strategic plan is and a standard way of producing one. Nevertheless, CMG IT Services did come back to the ABA with a return brief that Shannon says essentially was what the authority was looking for.
The ABA has four branches: planning and licensing; industry performance and review; legal and policy; and corporate. All had tended to do their own thing regarding IT, so according to Shannon, when CMG came on board the first step was to research and produce a statement for each of the branches that clearly defined their business needs and priorities. "I think that was very useful to the branches," Shannon says. "One of the big risks in a small organisation is that everybody's loaded down with their core business and every time you want to do something like this, they see it as a distraction from that and [ask]: Â'What's in it for us?'"CMG then facilitated sessions with each of the branches that Shannon says started to look at how those business needs related to IT both currently and in the future. These were then put into matrices in order to link all the synergies together. Again, Shannon says all the branches viewed this very positively and were happy to take part. From this, there were some further focus groups and discussions that resulted in an overall blueprint or strategic plan of where the branches were going and where they ideally wanted to get to. According to Shannon, the plan covers a time frame of three to five years.
"[The strategic plan] gives us a great deal of clarity about where we're going, how we're going to get there and what are the real drivers. But we stress that it's where we're heading as of today. We need to review this each year because we're never going to reach [the end point]. One to two years down the track that point will move but you must have some focus as to where you're going at a particular time," he says.
The ABA has developed a program of works for IT based on the direction of the strategic plan that includes the building of a large data warehouse, appointing a new ISP and developing a new Web site. Ipex was not involved in the strategic planning itself. Rather, Shannon says that its role will be to produce a technology plan that matches the strategic plan. In particular, he is looking to Ipex to rationalise the ABA's large number of servers and streamline its mix of Unix and Windows-based operating systems. However, he says that the principal benefit resulting from the strategic plan is that ABA staff now have a consistent, organisational-wide view of where the authority is going with IT. Rationalising the servers will also improve efficiency and lead to much better backup procedures and business continuity planning. The latter, he says, has not been well managed to date, leaving the organisation exposed to some risk.
Macquarie University: A Rational ApproachThe need to rationalise and replace disparate and ageing technologies also played a big part in Macquarie University's IT strategic planning. When Brian Kissell joined the university in 2000 to take charge of what was then the office of computer services, the story was a familiar one: a lack of faith in central IT's ability to deliver had built up and people consequently had gone off and done their own thing. At the same time, the university was going through a major change agenda. Following the completion of a formal work practice review and design exercise carried out in the second quarter of 2001, a new office of information technology services was established that forms part of the university's newly-formed division of e-learning and information services.
As a result of these imperatives, along with greater audit requirements, Kissell, director IT services, developed an IT strategic plan with these goals:
1. To build and maintain effective relationships between IT services and its clients and develop an in-depth understanding of their business requirements.
2. To develop and implement a blueprint for the life cycle support of core university systems and their supporting infrastructure.
3. To develop and maintain strong industry partnerships in pursuit of delivering a world-class technical infrastructure to the university community.
4. To build and maintain an organisational culture conducive to quality outcomes and operational processes.
5. To enshrine client focus as the underlying foundation for service delivery.
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.