Claremont Graduate University, Claremont School of Information Science and Technology IST306 Delivering Value Through IS&T Leadership

p Instructor: Dr. Rosemary Kim

Strategic Analysis: Strategic Vision Planning

Carlos Ricarte March 08, 2012

Strategic Vision Planning

External

History

NOW

Next Step

Ahead

Intern al

On Track

Behind

Time
Strategic Vision Planning (SVP) is used to give a companys leadership a planning framework to determine what the Next Step should be in IT or any other technology initiative. It also provides a means to determine if progress is being made toward achieving the vision statement. The first step is to determine what the Vision statement should be. The Vision is a mental representation of a strategy, created to serves as both an inspiration and a sense of what needs to be done. The vision is used to keep strategies aligned to meet the enterprises IT or other technology goals. It is the far away target that helps a company move forward in the right direction. It can be set to be a very realistic goal that has a high chance of succeeding or a science fiction goal where the state of technology doesnt support its existence but can be used to inspire the technology of today to stretch toward that goal. In many cases the vision will be periodically changed as the business environment changes or if new stretching goals are needed when your current IT initiatives are very close to meeting your vision. The next step is to research the past and present as depicted in the planning crosses shown in the framework. It is important to determine what research, development or actual implementations have been done by other in the past. You also need to determine what challenges and lessons learned have been experienced by others to help guide what the logical next step should be without repeating the same mistakes.

After the history has been examined it is now important to look at the current state of the technology from the prospective of both internally and externally. Some of the important things that must be determined is the maturity level of the technology and how it is being developed or used currently by others like your competitors. Internally to your organization, you must determine what resources you have in house to develop the new technology. From this assessment an organization can determine if resources exist internally such as capital, equipment, knowledgebase, and workforce. If not, you will also have a sense of where to acquire it based on the external assessment that was initiated. Finally based on the frameworked strategic planning steps, a company will be able to make an informed decision of what the Next Step should be in developing and/or implementing the next IT technology. This new initiative as represented visually by the planning cross can be tracked periodically to determine how close as a stepping stone to reaching the vision. An example of how the SVP framework could be used is with a fictional company who has a vision of converting all of its current password authentication systems for its workers to a pure biometric system. The vision is for its coworkers to not be required to maintain complex passwords that are easily forgotten or hacked and instead use biometric systems like retina and voice scanning. So based on our SVP framework we would research past attempts to use biometric systems and we would learn that at most fingerprint scanners have been the predominate technology to have been reliably adopted. We also determine that the biometric systems are currently still in their infancy and only the military has developed for limited use such systems as retina scanning. Next we would look at our resources and find that we have no in house experience or knowledge with these systems. Based on this strategic planning, the companies executives would decide that the next step would be to hire outside experts to implement a fingerprint authentication system that is combined with simpler passwords because it is reliable and the most economical to implement. The fingerprint system is also in line with the vision statement of getting to the point where only pure biometrics could be used.