Bring IT strategy to life with storytelling that shows how IT contributes to business success—and sets the stage for developing an equally clear one-page strategic plan.
July 13, 2021
Contributor: Kasey Panetta
Bring IT strategy to life with storytelling that shows how IT contributes to business success—and sets the stage for developing an equally clear one-page strategic plan.
Fit organisations—those that perform well in any market condition—distinguish themselves in part because they are great at creating, articulating and executing strategy in a way that maximises results. CIOs, for their part, have to help the enterprise understand how information and technology enable business capabilities that drive business success.
“CIOs can generate more impact by using storytelling to demonstrate how their strategies fuel business growth,” says Heather Colella, Vice President Analyst, Gartner. “Storytelling captures the adaptive nature of great strategy and helps organisations quickly determine priorities and investments. From a one-page story to a one-page strategic plan, the narrative evolves from idea to action.”
Download now: Your one-page IT strategy template and guide
Storytelling also helps CIOs to avoid the age-old trap of focusing on strategy documents—lengthy, technical documents that are rarely used in practice. Storytelling helps CIOs and IT leaders to engage business leaders in strategic business conversation by visualising the business model in a way that can be easily shared for collaboration across the enterprise.
In 1967, Rollin Kin and Herb Kelleher drew a triangle on a napkin. At each point was a city: Dallas, San Antonio and Houston. The two men created a vision for a low-cost commuter airline moving passengers between the three cities. And so Southwest Airlines was born, alongside a new industry for low-cost air transportation.
Capture your enterprise story on one page by using a four-step approach.
Creating a strategy begins with an understanding of the Value Disciplines model created by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema, authors of the Discipline of Market Leaders. Successful companies differentiate themselves in one of three ways:
Knowing which approach your company uses serves as a lens to focus the strategic decisions and investments to be made. For example, a product leader would invest more heavily in innovation processes and ensuring the company gets product to market before the competition.
Select a viewpoint and tell the story of your strategy from that position. For example:
Remember, this is an iterative process that should be revisited and changed as necessary.
For example, using the illustration shown, this process-driven strategy highlights a three- to six-year plan for a new CIO.
Translate the strategy story into a strategic plan
By capturing the strategy in a way that makes it easier to communicate and engage with business leaders, IT leaders can close the strategy-to-execution gap by developing a strategic plan that specifically defines the road map of initiatives and portfolio of investments required to execute on the strategy.
The strategic plan can also be captured on one page, providing IT leaders with an effective tool to summarise, visualise and communicate the link between the strategy and the strategic plan.
The one-page IT strategic plan summarises the key inputs and connects these to the key sections of the strategic plan output.
Three foundational elements of any strategic plan are:
Then create a roadmap for deploying each enabling capability and initiative, and a tracker of cross-enterprise dependencies and risks.