Why CIOs Must Be in the Room: Strategic IT Planning That Actually Works

Avoiding IT misalignment starts with showing up. Here’s how to draft an IT strategy that drives enterprise goals—without the chaos.

It is that time again. Time to draft my four-year Information Technology Strategic Plan.

Time has run out on the last one and with a new administration comes new leadership and with new leadership comes new guidance for the overall agency and my job is to make sure that technically we can achieve these goals that are identified throughout our strategic planning process.

I typically draft the overall goals, bullet points, identify some KPIs, and try to find the ROI while assisting in the drafting of the overall agency plan. If you, as the CIO, are not involved in the creation and drafting of the overall organization strategic plan then you are shortchanging the organization and yourself.

Why? Goals will be created that will rely on work from your department. These goals will have timelines associated with them and if you are not in the room while this was discussed and created you will find yourself running to catch up when it is time for the organization to achieve these goals. You may find yourself trying to negotiate for funding that may or may not exist for items that are required to help the organization to achieve these goals.

If You are Not in the Room…

Here’s what can happen if you’re not at the table when the strategic plan is crafted:

- Your IT Strategic Plan will not be in alignment with the organization’s goals

- You will be scrambling to justify funding for initiatives you didn’t know about

- Goals and timelines may conflict, forcing unnecessary trade-offs

- Unaccounted dependencies may delay or derail progress

Be in the Room

I have lived this. When I joined Voice of America as the CIO and Associate Director for Broadcast Operations, the rest of the senior leadership had already created their organizational strategic plan. That meant starting out of sync and leaving me starting on my backfoot. It was understandable due to the timing of my arrival, but meant I had to scramble.

I just needed to try to align the development of my plan with the already developed organization’s plan. One of the issues that we ran into pertained to the goal of significantly expanding television programming for key global markets. Programming was ready to launch. But broadcast operations? We did not have the resources to support the additional programming in the timeframe that they had identified. This showed a hole in the planning logic of the leadership team.

I had to escalate. I sat down with the CEO and explained why we could not accomplish the task on the timeframe that they had identified. I explained that we did not have the studio space nor manpower to provide support for the amount of new programming that was planned. This led me to have to come up with innovative solutions to get us to achieve the organizational goal, and unpleasantly rushing to do so.

To solve the problem, we came up with implementing camera robotics and other technical solutions to streamline the work within the television studio control rooms. This would allow us to achieve the filming of each program with less studio personnel, thereby allowing us to spread out the television studio support personnel across the planned programming schedule.

7Ps

This wasn’t just a technology project. This required implementing a major organizational change, funding, acquiring, and implementing new technology, as well as negotiations with the union. None of which was planned for in the timelines developed during the organization’s strategic planning process. If I had been in the room (or probably in this case my predecessor), then these are considerations that would have been brought forward at the time and could have been properly planned for. As I learned in the Marine Corps: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance - the 7 Ps.

Weren’t in the Room? Do This Next.

What happens if you are not in the room? Then you may end up in a situation that is similar to what I describe above. With all those requirements that were needed to expand programming the timeline was greatly extended. You don’t knock out organizational change in a day.

To make life easier, make sure you review the already developed organizational strategic plan and use that as a baseline in which to operate. You can identify areas that may be affected due to lack of resources, supply chain issues, or technical dependencies that were not accounted for during the initial planning. Once you have identified these issues, speak up and bring them to the owner of that goal’s attention. And then start incorporating them into your IT strategic plan and use this time to share with your fellow senior executives why it is important that you are in the room in the future.

You’re not just the tech lead. You are a business partner.

Next week Part 2 – Home in on your priorities