The death of long-term IT planning

Who doesn’t love a plan, or a planner: if you follow this map, do what this step-by-step plan says, you’re guaranteed success at the end of the road.

The problem with IT architecture planning, though, is that everything is changing all the time. If your company is trying to set a plan that will last five to 10 years down the road, forget it. It’s impossible to set a plan in stone when technology is moving so fast.

“To say you’re going to have a five-year plan on how you’re going to migrate X, there’s a very good chance that X might not exist anymore, or there’s a Y that’s even better,” says Randy Gross, CIO of CompTIA. “The horizon is closer than it ever has been.”

Planning or lack thereof: you’re not alone

In a survey of 500 U.S.-based businesses, CompTIA found that only 34 percent of companies currently develop an IT architecture plan beyond a 12-month window. Small firms (1-99 employees) are least likely to engage in planning activity, with 41 percent doing no planning at all, compared to 20 percent of medium sized companies (100-499 employees) and 12 percent of large sized companies (500+ employees).

The survey also found that a lot of firms don’t think they’re planning very well: 43 percent reported that they’re “in the middle” of technology mindset and practices. Eleven percent said they’re in the lower tier and two percent said they’re near the bottom.

Gross says he was surprised about the lack of confidence by firms about where they’re at in their planning. However, it’s not a bad thing to see this unease quantified, and to talk about it. “The assumption is that everyone is always ahead of you in whatever planning is going on,” he says. “So it was good to see a lot of organizations are trying to figure these things out.”

Instead of feeling intimidated that they’re behind the curve, CIOs can look at this and know that “a lot of folks are still working toward what this is supposed to look like,” he adds.

A flex plan

Strategic planning doesn’t mean what it used to. Today, it’s about having the conversations with business peers to know which mountain you’re going to climb, not the exact route you’ll take to get to the top.

That means that other stakeholders need to be invested what IT is doing – and vice versa.

“If you haven’t planned, it means you haven’t actually spoken with your business stakeholders,” says Gross. “And if you haven’t spoken to your business stakeholders about their goals, you’re simply the IT department that handles email.”

Other than not meeting stakeholder goals, if IT and those stakeholders aren’t all on the same page, they’ll go rogue, which could open a Pandora’s box of problems, especially if your company needs to meet compliance standards.

“CIOs and organizations are finding out they have no idea all the systems the different business units are using in the cloud,” says Jen Kurtz, CTO at tax technology provider Vertex. “Since IT wasn’t involved, what were the security considerations made, what kind of data is being stored in these fast solutions that may not be corporate policy to be stored offsite?” These problems compound for companies that have compliance requirements that may not be met with whatever solutions departments found and bought on their own.

That’s why having a flexible plan in place – with short and long-term goals – can serve the business while also helping IT to climb the mountain before them.

Bringing in a third party can help too. Sometimes business stakeholders know what they want to do and can’t articulate it in ways that the IT department understands, or “there’s a million priority one things that the CIO has to do just to keep the lights on,” says Greg Crouse, managing director of Navigant Consulting, Inc.

If business units and the IT department can’t figure out how to talk to each other on these issues, or IT can’t look beyond the day to day and can’t dedicate time to a long-term plan, a third party can help. It’s like having an “arbitrator between the two, somebody who can speak both languages,” says Crouse. “We’re also a neutral third party who doesn’t really have a stake in the game. We know when we can call BS on certain things as well.”  

Gross says that planning with general trends in mind can also help. For example: desktop versus web-based applications. “It’s not going to stay with desktop,” he says. “[There are clear themes] I assume most CIOs are aware of that you’re going to keep moving toward.”

Test – and fail – fast

A bimodal approach can work for a lot of companies, says Kurtz because it will both keep the company running and also allow IT to experiment with different systems on a small scale to see if they work. “They’re failing fast, but they’re also finding successes. When they find the success, the challenge is how does that integrate into the organization?” 

[ Related: Why digital disruption leaves no room for bimodal IT ]

All this experimentation will eventually create its own challenges, especially because most likely those new systems that do work run in the cloud and will need to fit into legacy systems (at least at first), but for a lot of organizations, it’s the best way to try out new technologies that will help companies climb that mountain. Kurtz sees this as vital for the future of most companies.

“If you’re not a startup, you’re basically under threat in any industry,” Kurtz says. “CEOs and boards are seeing this. They’re expecting the CIOs to come to the table with these solutions. I don’t think they have an option of saying no, we’re not going to do this, it’s not working out. The choice that may have been there a few years ago has gone away.”

Gross jokes that he loves sending staff to conferences but “it’s more expensive when they come back than it is to send them to the conference” because it introduces them to vendors and solutions they want to try – but it also helps them fill out what the solution might be for the future as those technologies change.

“You don’t have to plan or predict what’s going to happen for the entire world. Sometimes you’re not as far behind as you think,” Gross says. “If you’re able to push the ball forward, a lot of the time you’re making a lot of progress that way. Being systematic and curious can yield a lot of benefit.”