Is Your It Organization Really Future-Focused- Knowing the Difference between Strategic Planning and Traditional Long-Term Planning Can Help CIOs Answer This Question

Clayton Voignier, Director, Strategy and Innovation, Union County

One of the most important ways that chief information officers (CIOs) lead their IT organizations is by articulating their vision and mission through strategic planning. However, what most people think of as strategic planning is traditional, long-term or linear planning. Let’s explore the differences.

The strategic thinking and management process, i.e. strategic planning, is very different than the traditional long-term planning process, which is typically, yet mistakenly referred to as “strategic planning”. Unlike traditional long-term planning, which is focused on making incremental improvements to the existing organizational or business model, strategic thinking and management process is focused on envisioning and planning for a time when the existing organizational or business model - will no longer work no matter how much incremental improvement is made.

While both processes are concerned with future, traditional long-term planning usually involves determining a future based on what the organization wants to do within the current way of operating whereas strategic planning involves envisioning a different future based on what the external forces of change are telling the organization to do. As such, the traditional long-term planning process begins with the current state and proposes a path to meet estimated future wants while strategic planning begins with the desired future state and works backward to establish the necessary current state.

A typical long-term planning process involves developing vision, mission and values statements, setting goals and objectives, and formulating strategies, action steps and performance indicators in that order. Most government IT organizations are familiar with this approach. What is likely to be less familiar are the major phases of the typical strategic planning process outlined below:

Determine core values
Understand key strategic trends in the external environment
Identify key future distinct competencies
Assess the desirability of the external and internal environments
Formulate or adjust vision, mission, strategies, actions and progress measures

While some elements from planning processes are similar, strategic planning involves looking comprehensively at the external environment than traditional, long-term planning. Using the latter approach for example, an IT organization may identify the general macro trends in the external environment. However, strategic planning involves identifying key strategic trends in the macro environment as well as the IT sector, and the specific IT industries, i.e. technology hardware and equipment, software and services, and semiconductors and equipment. One way to accomplish this is to conduct a SWOT, PEST or similar analysis for each area – macro environment, IT sector and each IT industry – and prioritize the results to uncover the key strategic trends.

Brainstorming and identifying key future distinct competencies for each key strategic trend should be conducted before establishing vision and mission statements. A distinct competency is a unique underlying capability or resource that will result in doing something significantly better than other benchmark IT organizations. In the private sector, these would be business competitors, but for governments competition centers around excellence not market share. Similar to specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound (SMART) goals, key future distinct competencies should be specific, measurable, and sustainable. Most of us think of competencies during annual performance appraisals, such as core competencies of problem-solving ability, presentation skills or budget responsibility. However, key future distinct competencies are specific to operations, such as comprehensive business continuity planning, efficient systems implementation and integration or effective IT governance.

Like key future distinct competencies, assessing the desirability of the internal and external environments should be completed prior to developing vision and mission statements which is not typical of traditional long-term planning. This assessment is directional in nature meaning that the internal and external environments are either positive, and thus favorable to the IT organization, or negative, and thus disadvantageous to the IT organization, or neutral. For the external environment, the assessment should be driven by the key strategic trends, and for the internal environment, the assessment should focus on whether or not the IT organization already possesses any key future distinct competencies. Results from both identifying key future distinct competencies and assessing the desirability of the internal and external environments should provide more specificity and clarity to the IT organization when drafting vision and mission statements that will set its course for the future.

Based on the differences explored here, some might conclude that traditional, long-term planning is inferior to strategic planning. On the contrary, for an IT organization to be successful, strategic planning must be done continuously and simultaneously alongside traditional long-term planning, and knowing these differences is critical to determining whether or not your IT organization is truly future-focused.