Implementing World Class IT Strategy Quotes

“Leverage technology to improve business processes and operations to benefit our company and our customers.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“Jerry’s conclusion after investigating these issues was that IT lacked a clear strategy of its own. Much of this was due to the fact that the rest of the organization was not clear as to where the business should be in one or three or five years, and no one was offering thoughts on the processes, products, and services that would get them there other than simple extensions of what already existed.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“You will also note that I try to avoid referring to “the business” as something that is separate from IT. It is still quite common for CIOs to refer to the rest of the organization as “the business,” but again it suggests a distance between what it does and where true business value is created. The IT team must think of itself as part of the business. Therefore, I like to refer to “IT and the rest of the organization,” and to the CIO and his or her colleagues in other divisions as “the IT team and colleagues outside of IT.” Words matter, and this is a message I have been hammering home with my CIO clients extensively for the past few years.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“The IT team must think of itself as part of the business.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“Goals. OGTM uses this term to mean metrics of success. As metrics, goals should be fashioned as means of qualifying success at achieving an objective. Each goal needs to be SMART, an acronym that means Specific Measurable Actionable Realistic Time-constrained2”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“Articulate where in IT and its staff you can put your mission statement to immediate practical use as a guideline or filter: In metrics In recruitment Elsewhere within IT”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“Be able to “deconstruct” your mission statement into highly meaningful and prescriptive phrases.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“Projects should be the outcome of missions and strategies, not the drivers of them.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“Creating a value-oriented IT mission is particularly important in those scenarios in which the IT department does not have much guidance from the rest of the organization, does not yet have a strong IT strategy per se, or both. It is a great first point of orientation for the IT department. That said, it is also highly effective to continue to keep in place for the IT team in general to learn, almost like a mantra.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“Changes in priorities should drive changes in projects, not the other way around. In reality, often project ideas are allowed to trump strategy, and the opinions of a single, powerful executive trump the logic of the strategic plan.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“Projects Don’t Drive Strategy”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“It is important that IT recognize that the only customers are those people who provide funds to the company, and refer to colleagues as, well, colleagues or perhaps as partners.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“strategy is as much about defining what not to do as it is about what to do.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“To be truly strategic, CIOs need to think about how value is created. Many are good at cost cutting, but this is almost by definition a backward looking exercise—optimizing something that is already in place. This is not strategic. CIOs need to think about what future possibilities there are to leverage technology for new value and top-line growth. This is what differentiates the strategic CIO.11”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“Too many CIOs get mired in day-to-day firefighting.” He adds, “First, a CIO must think about simplification of technology to create space for his or her team to think about value creation. There is no value creation in firefighting.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“that he needed to “market” this plan and influence others in order to accomplish it. Although he had power in his new role, it was not absolute.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“He documented touchpoints with the various agencies and departments where applicable, recognizing”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“He provided success metrics and milestones that he and others could track to gauge progress along the way (transparency was a key tenet).”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“He developed a vision and a strategy based on identified value and communicating it using simple, easy-to-understand terminology.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation

“setting a direction for the technological approach to the Games that would still be malleable enough to change as he engaged further with his fellow committee leaders. He couldn’t wait for them to get started.”
― Peter A High, Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation