Kissell admits that the plan is a first cut and high level. However, he says it reflects a number of recommendations resulting from the work practice review and also establishes a formal baseline for ongoing development of strategic objectives, aligned to identified business goals and objectives. Its time frame is three years but he plans to revisit and upgrade it every year and undertakes quarterly reviews of how well it is being put into practice.
Central to the IT strategy, in particular the third goal, has been the implementation of a new data centre to deliver Web services to students, staff and other organisations that deal with Macquarie University. The solution, which Kissell says is now live but still evolving, includes an enterprise-wide portal that enables more than 25,500 users to access a full range of university services from anywhere at any time via a single sign-on. These include enrolments, training courses, exam results, library services, human resources information, finance systems and research data, as well as a personal calendar and e-mail account. "Students and staff today are becoming more demanding and expect to be able to interact with the university when and where it suits them. So we're putting infrastructure in place that will enable us to take advantage of new technologies as they arrive," he says.
According to Kissell, individual divisions within Macquarie University have been good at developing their own strategic plans, but have tended to do them in isolation. Now he says the vice-chancellor is trying to build an overall, more cohesive plan for the university that clearly articulates where it is going. Kissell has also contributed to this, and says that in aligning IT strategy to the overall plan he and his team are winning the university over to IT services, although some resistance remains.
"There is still a bit of a Â'blame IT' mentality and culture change does take time, especially when things have been too free in the past," says Kissell. "Slowly but surely, though, people are coming to realise the benefits of our strategic direction."
Hewlett Packard: Merger Minefield
While Sigma's Smyrk says the private sector is lagging when it comes to strategic planning, there is nothing like a merger or acquisition to force a review of a company's IT strategy. For while a merger may make good business and administrative sense (or not as the case may be), it can be a nightmare for those charged with integrating the disparate IT environments. And regardless of industry, mergers do not come much bigger than that between Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Compaq.
The "new HP" is structured along four independent business lines. Since the merger got the green light in May 2002, Kerry Holling, director of the information technology group for HP Australia, says he has been aligning his internal IT organisation and staff with those respective business units depending on their skills and experience.
A decision has also recently been made to manage HP's own IT infrastructure through HP's outsourcing business, or "insource" it, as Holling calls it. However, he has a head start in this respect, as he went through the same process three years ago while he was in charge of internal IT at Compaq Australia. In fact, Holling has been through the whole merger process himself before. He was originally information services director at Digital Equipment Corporation Australia when Compaq acquired Digital in mid-1998. He subsequently took on the combined internal IT role at Compaq Australia and is now doing the same at Hewlett-Packard for Australia and New Zealand.
However, while infrastructure is a huge component of HP's overall IT strategy, the new combined entity also has a global portfolio of 7000 applications, which Holling says it needs to drastically reduce. To this end, and prior to the actual launch of the new HP, the company set up "clean rooms" to plan the integration process at a corporate level. In fact, from an IT perspective, Holling says that truly strategic plans come out of corporate and the plans he puts in place at a country level are more tactical.
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"The clean room plans are really what we're working to now. However, there's a lot of detail at a country level that isn't understood by the corporate clean rooms, so we have to work through that locally to make sure we line up behind those corporate strategies," he says. "We're not necessarily happy with all the clean room decisions but we can see the logic in them; what may be sub-optimal for the country may be optimal for the corporation as a whole. So we just take the pragmatic attitude that sometimes you have to take half a step back before you can take two steps forward together, rather than every country doing its own thing.
Nor does IT planning take place in isolation.
"Locally we have an integrated planning process. About every quarter, the country leadership team, which I sit on, locks itself away for several days. We basically come up with an integrated plan for the subsidiary and then the plans that cascade throughout the various organisations, such as my IT plan, directly reflect the priorities that were established in that session. The strategy to move our infrastructure management to the outsourcing business [for example] is implicitly tied to that aspect of our business because what we learn from doing the work for ourselves can then be applied in the marketplace," Holling says.
Holling also points out that HP's IT strategy is not limited to just integrating the two pre-merger environments. The business does not stand still, he says, and he and his organisation also have to look out for "hand grenades coming over the wall", as was the case in the Compaq/Digital merger, with Y2K and the GST.
"We really leverage corporate decisions, but from a sales and marketing perspective we might want to initiate some [unique] program in Australia and then we do have to come up with an IT strategy as well as tactical implementation plans for that piece of work," he says. vWhich one first:
The Chicken or the Egg
Your IT strategic plan better synch with the corporate vision.
Regarding the perennial issue of aligning IT and business, John Smyrk, principal of Sigma Management Sciences and a visiting fellow of the National Graduate School of Management at the Australian National University, does not believe it is possible for a complete IT plan to be any wider or longer in its vision than the organisation's corporate plan.
However, it is possible, he says, for an organisation to make strategic commitments to technology that take it beyond the horizon of its corporate planning. And while an IT strategic plan should ideally be drawn up in conjunction with the corporate plan, it rarely happens, he says.
"After establishing a clear vision for the organisation strategically, ideally you would then answer the question: Â'What do we need to do with technology to support that?' However, you rarely have the same levels of awareness in the business arena that you have in the IT arena," says Smyrk. "So often companies will develop a corporate plan without being aware there's even such a concept as an IT strategic plan.
"Or sometimes you'll find experienced IT people want to do an IT strategic plan in the absence of any corporate planning framework and often the commitments that are involved in that make no sense whatsoever because there's no business drivers or business rationale for what they're doing. Plans of that kind are an absolute waste of resources because if you have a technical rationale for an IT strategy but not a business rationale, it inevitably fails." Smyrk says.
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