Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

This is Part II of a two-part series on moving from a strategic planning to strategic management process. Rob Jackson is a Senior Consultant with Community IT Innovators.

Strategic management is a logical set of connected activities that enables the organization to make its strategy work. It is a process. It is not the result of a single decision or action. It is the result of a series of integrated decisions or actions that get measured over time.

For the purposes of this discussion, strategic management includes:

• Strategic planning
• Budgeting
• Performance management
• Strategic measurement
• Evaluation

Information Technology (IT) should have a role in all of these functions, and below we explain IT’s role in the strategic management process:

Strategic Planning
While IT professionals are not strategic planners, per se, IT professionals should be members of the strategic planning team and serve as technical resources during strategy formulation. Business strategies must be translated into short term operating objectives, data must be collected and aggregated for analysis against the plan, and eventually IT will be called upon to develop the systems that will institutionalize new attitudes and automate new patterns of behavior within the organization’s information systems.

Budgeting
To realize IT value, nonprofit organization should develop an IT budget with a three to four year horizon. It should include a list of all recurring IT costs related to Personnel, Contractors, Software, Hardware, Data and Telecommunications, as well as any re-occurring costs associated with maintaining the organizations IT portfolio.

The IT budget should be developed holistically with the expected funding levels from all departments, the organization’s calendar, the sequence of projects and respective timelines, and be mapped to the organization’s operational objectives. The organization’s leadership should look for common costs, reduce unnecessary expenses and work collaboratively with the IT staff to align the IT budget with the organization’s strategy.

Performance Measurement
From an IT perspective, performance measurement systems can provide a convenient and expedient method for organizations to summarize and report on critical measures for organizational success, but it is only a piece of the strategic management process. Performance management works to:

• Manage the implementation of agreed upon strategies
• Assess the performance of those strategies
• Reconcile inconsistencies and misalignments
• Formulate new and revised strategies

Strategic Measurement
Similarly, strategic measurement systems can facilitate the collection key performance data, but it is only a piece of the strategic management process. From an IT perspective, it differs from performance management because it:

• Continuously monitors the fit between the organization and the environment
• Tracks external trends and forces that are likely to affect the organization
• Develops information flows that shape internal and external communication
• Provides a clear vision for the type of organization the organization is striving to become
• Creates strategic agendas at various levels, and in all parts of the organization to ensure they become the driving force in all other decision making
• Guides the other management processes in an integrated manner to support and enhance these strategic agendas

Evaluation
From an evaluation perspective, IT must be involved in the process that identifies inputs and codifies all of the observable and measurable targets to ensure data quality. IT can also be used to help the organization track changes in value, condition and status regardless of the type of evaluation being employed.

In conclusion, the successful management of any organization’s strategy depends on the design, use and alignment of these functions to achieve the desired result. So, coordinating workflows, transferring relevant knowledge effectively from one part of the organization to another and achieving integration so as to meet organizational objectives are all ingredients for successful strategic management that can be achieved by using IT strategically.

Seventeen years ago, researchers at IBM concluded that the anticipated value of Information Technology (IT) investment was not being realized because there was a lack of alignment between business and IT strategy.

“IT is transcending its traditional ‘back office’ role and is evolving toward a “strategic” role with the potential not only to support chosen business strategies, but also to shape new business strategies. Yet, there is increasing concern that the anticipated value of the investment in IT is not being achieved … We argue that the inability to realize value from IT investments is, in part, due to the lack of alignment between the business and IT strategies of organizations. We view strategy as involving both formulation (decisions pertaining to competitive, product-market choices) and implementation (choice that pertain to the structure and capabilities of the firm to execute its product-market choices).” — IBM Systems Journal, March, 1993; by John C. Henderson, N. Venkatraman

Within the nonprofit sector, the inability to realize IT value is due to the low priority that nonprofit organizations place on IT strategy. Simply put, IT is not considered to be a strategic asset within the nonprofit sector and the staff that support the organization’s IT functions are rarely involved in the organization’s strategic planning process.

Realizing IT as a Strategic Asset
As the quote above suggests, technology within the nonprofit sector has grown beyond the back office to play a more strategic role within the organization. It has become essential to the successful implementation of strategies that facilitate and improve stakeholder and constituent outreach, data collection, information management, and outcome reporting, yet IT is still not considered to be a strategic asset within the organization. Technology influences the way nonprofit organizations govern themselves, structure themselves, communicate, build capacity, and scale their operations, yet IT is often an afterthought.

In today’s economy, there is a great need to help nonprofits control cost, minimize risk, and accelerate revenue growth. While there are a number of ways to accomplish these objectives, very few nonprofits have a plan that explicitly states the role technology can play in achieving these objectives. As Business IT consultants, we believe that many, if not all of the organization’s strategic initiatives can be enhanced by developing an understanding for what IT can do, setting the appropriate expectations about what IT can accomplish, and executing a strategic plan that is enabled by, and aligned with, the organization’s IT portfolio.

As Business IT consultants, we help organizations understand the possibilities of using IT to effectively achieve its mission, but we also help set appropriate expectations for what IT can do given the organization’s constraints. Yet between the possibilities and the expectations, we believe there is an extraordinary opportunity to help nonprofit organizations successfully execute desirable changes and enhance the capacity for future results by making IT a greater priority within the strategic planning process.

Simultaneous Planning and Doing
Our experience suggests that strategic success demands a simultaneous effort toward planning and doing, and successful strategic outcomes are best achieved when those responsible for the execution are also part of the formulation process. In most nonprofit organizations, IT is responsible for a great deal of the “doing” when implementing the organization’s strategy, but it does not have a prominent role within the strategic planning process. IT can inform strategy formulation during the planning process and begin to align the organization’s information management capabilities with the organization’s strategic objectives.

IT needs to have a more prominent role within the strategic planning process so that it can to help the organization move from strategic planning to strategic management.

This conversation will continue later this month in Part II which details the role of technology in strategic management. Rob Jackson is a Senior Consultant with Community IT Innovators.