As economic conditions improve, Forrester estimates that global spending on technology will accelerate to $4.7 billion this year. This increase in spending raises the expectations of technology leaders to drive their companies’ growth agenda. Unfortunately, IT strategies that are disconnected from business strategies often undermine the positive impact IT teams can have on business success. The key to maximizing the impact of your technology investments is to align technology and business strategies.
4 IT Styles That Set the Framework for High-Performance Strategies
A high-performance IT strategy gives technology leaders a simple framework for shaping investment budgets to continually improve business results through technology. This framework is built around four IT styles that align with the dominant needs of a business initiative, a group, or the company itself. The four IT styles are:
- Making possible.
- Co-creating.
- Amplifying.
- Transforming.
Each IT style offers guidance to help you shape your investment budgets. The four styles are also directly linked to business results for:
- Enable business success with rock-solid resilience, stability, and security.
- Co-create products and services that open new markets.
- Amplify business performance with data analytics and automation.
- Transform yourself with technology to seek new business models.
3 principles for building your high-performance IT strategy
A high-performance IT strategy helps technology leaders determine and deliver the appropriate mix of IT resources needed to achieve business results. Create your high-performance IT strategy based on three execution principles: strong alignment, deep trust, and high adaptability.
Strong alignment
The more IT understands and is aligned with specific business teams and initiatives, the easier it will be to deliver what the business needs at that moment. This means alignment within IT, alignment with business teams, and alignment of both with the needs of end customers.
Executives at companies with high levels of alignment across functions like marketing, customer experience and digital report 2.4x higher revenue growth and twice the higher profitability growth than those with some or no alignment. And these same high-performing companies are 1.6 times more likely to have IT organizations that are highly aligned with the business, according to data from Forrester.
Deep trust
Building trust through security, privacy and resilience is a fundamental principle of high-performance IT; and builds trust in the CIO and IT across the enterprise. Trust is important because it drives revenue and customer loyalty.
For example, customers who trust their bank tend to use additional products and services three times more often than those who don’t trust their bank, according to Forrester. Your employees are more likely to be productive and effective and your partners are more likely to facilitate faster routes to market. In the public sector, citizens are more likely to support policies and expert advice from an agency they trust.
High adaptability
Business change is based on technology and both must be highly attuned to the new needs of customers and the market. Adaptability allows companies to quickly move technology, capital and people to respond to market changes. Adaptability creates resilience and stimulates innovation.
According to our data, respondents from the most adaptive organizations reported, on average, twice as much annual growth as other respondents. High-performance IT favors the distinctive behaviors of an adaptive organization, such as the use of predictive analytics and flexible technologies, tuned to the organization’s specific needs.
How to get started with your high-performance strategy
Understanding these execution principles will help you identify where you are already strong and where you need to make changes to your IT organization or operating model to deliver what is needed. With this understanding framed through the lens of IT styles, you will have the foundations in place.
To organize your thinking and get started, ask yourself three questions:
- Are your teams aligned and prepared to know what your business’s dominant need is for this year or initiative? The dominant business need determines the core IT style your company needs to succeed. This means bringing together IT and business teams, skills and relationships. This linkage provides the platform to articulate business goals and the IT resources needed to achieve them.
- Have you evaluated your current capabilities to see how they align with the style of IT your business needs? Informed by the dominant business demand for technology, you will be ready to evaluate your current technology capabilities. You will identify where you stand out and where there are gaps. Comparing your capabilities to the four high-performance IT styles will reveal where you are strong and where you need to change or expand investments.
- How do you enable your high-performance IT strategy to deliver what your business needs? Now the hard work begins. With this understanding in place, you’re ready to dive into the details of your high-performance IT organization: capacity maps and changes; investment and communication strategies; and a high-performance operating model, with its competencies, technologies and practices.
With a more detailed understanding of your organization’s needs, current capabilities, gaps, and readiness, you can prioritize your technology spending, know where you can pull back, and determine how best to deliver the IT resources your business needs to succeed.
This article was written by Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. As a member of Forrester’s Technology Executive Research team, Ted’s research and guidance experience focuses on helping leaders maximize the value of partners, high-performance IT, and the CIO’s role in growth, commerce, and impact of generative AI on IT and business. Co-author of the books “The Mobile Mind Shift: Engineer Your Business to Win in the Mobile Moment” (Groundswell Press) and “Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business” (Harvard Business Review Press), Ted has a master’s degree in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Maryland, and a bachelor’s degree with honors in physics from Swarthmore College.
