Beyond Alignment: Readiness Assessment

Putting in place Forrester's BT strategy framework requires a business-savvy IT team to support and work with the business-unit leadership teams. It also requires the IT team to have mastered the fundamentals of running IT. Before launching a BT strategic planning initiative, it is vital that you take the time to do a self-assessment to determine what potential roadblocks may lie ahead.
To help understand what factors need to be assessed, we turned to our research to identify the factors CIOs cite as being critical to helping them develop a true strategic partnership with business units. We built the BT Strategic Planning Readiness Assessment Tool from the best practices surfaced in our research, and we identified three stages of IT and business-unit integration that most organizations transition through: foundation, communication, and innovation. Your IT team may be proficient in many of these tactics for running IT and lacking in others. The aim of the assessment is to help you identify where you may need to apply some focus. While it's not critical that your team do everything well, the more they do, the easier it will be for you to succeed in partnering with the business units in applying business technology strategic planning.