Recycled Bullsh-IT

As you dimly remember your ABC (Age Before Coronavirus), one of the many things that may have slipped your mind is your 2020 IT Strategy & Vision pack, which is probably gathering digital dust in a dim corner of your SharePoint site. Of course, your intranet is nothing but dim corners as it’s such a bugger to find anything useful on it, but that’s another story.

 Having written far too many IT strategy documents in my long and extinguished career, I feel it is time to confess what we all knew deep down to be the case – it’s (or is that IT’s) all bullocks. Let me deconstruct the twaddle we put together every year and explain what we should have done.

 One Vision

Sometime in Q3 each year we are asked to put together our business plans for the following planning period. See my jaundiced view of this budgeting process in a previous blog, The Real-Time Business.  To help justify the vast IT budgets we want to inflate, we put together our grand IT Strategy pack, consisting of [takes large breath]: Mission Statement, Vision, Strategy, Goals, Objectives, Principles, Future State Architecture, Roadmaps, and finally (don’t laugh) Business Alignment.

 A Kind of Magic

Experienced IT chiefs will apply Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law – “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – to their writing to ensure that the executives and bean counters can’t pull apart your strategy because they can’t understand it. As I mention in my Rough Guide to Becoming a CIO it’s best to keep IT as ineffable as possible, normally resulting in much effing and blinding from your frustrated business leaders.

 Under Pressure

Of course, all this effort will still lead to your budgets being slashed by the obligatory 10%, plus another xx% for trying it on, leaving your chances of achieving your shiny Future State Vision the same as the previous year – so small you’ll be using Planck units to measure it. Add to this the threat of increasing amounts of Shadow IT sucking the life out of your function, particularly from anyone with Digital in their title, and you might as well replace your entire strategy with the cover art from The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds to denote what is actually happening to IT.

 Another One Bites the Dust

So, you might as well furlough your strategy for this year, and I suggest taking a different tack for your pack in future years, which should consist of just the following:

Mission Statement

Do whatever the business wants without anyone (i.e. you) getting arrested

Vision

I’m still in my job at Christmas

Strategy

Nail down the business requirements

Find some schmuck supplier to deliver the service

Continually beat the supplier with a large hammer to make sure it works

Goals

1)     Appear flexible and agile

2)     Make it look cheap

3)     Have a scapegoat lined up for the inevitable data breaches

4)     Get AI, RPA and Edge Computing on your CV

5)     Avoid own goals

Principles

Ditch them if you ever had any to start with

Future State Architecture

It’s the Cloud, Stupid

Roadmap

The mother of all Gantt charts stuffed with technobabble

Business Alignment

Tongue up CEO’s rectum while being shafted by the CMO and whipped by the CFO

 Now with the time I’ve saved you in writing next year’s strategy, you can actually get on with something useful while you wait for your P45, like practising video interview techniques. 

John “Innuendo” Moe