Enterprise strategic development: how to make IT strategic planning more pragmatic

The so-called "broad sense" IT planning refers to fully analyzing the operation mode of the enterprise's core value chain from the enterprise strategy, and then finding out the support points and opportunities of IT, so as to clarify the enterprise's IT strategy, build the enterprise's IT application blueprint, IT governance model, information resource system and system implementation plan, and thus realize effective support for the enterprise's strategic objectives. "Narrow sense" IT planning focuses on the planning and arrangement of system hardware, system software and development technology, focusing on technology. The IT planning we are discussing here is mainly aimed at "generalized" IT planning. Generally speaking, the operation idea of IT planning is divided into four steps, namely, defining IT strategy, analyzing IT capability, IT solution and IT action plan. In the stage of defining IT strategy, IT is necessary to analyze the enterprise's strategy, vision and objectives, and deeply analyze the relevant business links of the core value chain, so as to find the support points and opportunities of IT from the business model and process, and then build an IT strategy to support the business development strategy and formulate the objectives of information construction. In the stage of IT capabilITy analysis, firstly, it will combine the IT support points of the enterprise and start from the core business links to analyze and form the IT requirements and IT objectives of the enterprise at different levels. Then, build a reasonable IT evaluation model, comprehensively evaluate the informatization status of enterprises, analyze the gaps and constraints, and provide a basis for future IT blueprints and system planning. In the IT solution stage, IT is necessary to combine the achievements of the above two stages, design the IT application blueprint of the enterprise, analyze the integration points of the application system, build the IT infrastructure of the enterprise, and at the same time describe and analyze these contents in depth. In the stage of IT action plan, IT is necessary to make a comprehensive plan for the designed IT blueprint, formulate the steps of enterprise informatization construction, analyze the risks and benefits, and give the enterprise IT governance plan at the same time, and form a specific enterprise informatization action plan on this basis to guide the next action of the enterprise. Here, we don't want to introduce the specific content and achievements of IT planning with a long speech, but we want to discuss the phenomenon that some IT planning projects can't help enterprises solve practical problems. These IT planning projects and the actual information construction of enterprises often have the phenomenon of "two skins". In the IT planning stage, the project team will help enterprises draw a beautiful blueprint for information construction, and will tell enterprises how to do it with various "scientific" analytical tools and many "fresh" terms. However, after the project team quit, it is often difficult for enterprises to implement the content of IT planning, even divorced from the actual situation of enterprises, and they have to start again, which not only wastes the time and money of enterprises, but also shakes the confidence of enterprise information construction. First, we are superstitious about best practices, and everything meets the benchmark. When planning it, it ignores the actual situation of enterprises, including the differences in human environment, regional culture and historical traditions, especially the various "personalized" problems faced by domestic enterprises during the period of change. In this case, consultants always try to use technology to drive management and business changes, and lack effective communication with enterprises at all levels. Therefore, it is difficult to help enterprises establish a pragmatic and efficient information framework, and even lead to some misleading, leading to various practical problems that plague enterprises in the subsequent information construction process. The well-known project of upgrading the core business system of a commercial bank, which has been speculated by the industry recently, may have such problems. In the early planning and selection, the advanced nature of the system and benchmark cases were overemphasized, while the business and management status of the enterprise itself were neglected, which led to the uncontrollable system construction process and the final project was stopped. Second, the consulting company lacks in-depth understanding of the management and operation of domestic enterprises, and cannot find out the pulse of enterprise management. Although the IT planning report also includes clear corporate strategy, business and process combing. Due to the lack of experience and understanding of consultants, these analysis results often cannot be effectively combined with the IT strategy, IT blueprint and action plan behind them, and the resulting report is rich in content and looks "colorful". However, in fact, the contents of each part are separated and have no complete logical relationship. The final solution provided to enterprises focuses on technical feasibility and is a "narrow sense" IT planning. What needs to be explained here is that the problems that domestic enterprises want to solve at this stage must be comprehensive, even IT construction must solve the problems of enterprise strategy, management and business, and even IT needs to be used to improve the execution of enterprises, make up for the shortcomings of the system, and enhance the construction of culture. Some aspects may violate the original intention of IT, but this is the reality of domestic enterprises at present, and it is also a problem that must be faced in the process of IT planning. Therefore, how to effectively support the business development strategy oriented to the enterprise strategy, effectively match the business model with the IT system, find out the IT support points that can be landed, and form IT requirements at all levels is the real concern of IT planning. Third, in the planning process, we pay attention to the construction of application systems, networks and hardware platforms, while ignoring the information content itself closely related to enterprise management and business. Many information systems are often established, but no information resources are available to support the operation of enterprises. Business executives often complain: "With such an advanced information system, why can't I see a lot of things I want to know?" ? Why can't our information system capture the change sensitively when the market situation changes suddenly? From the analysis, IT can be seen that such IT planning is more to meet the technical needs of enterprises than to serve the business development and management operation of enterprises. If the overall IT framework of an enterprise is constructed according to this idea, after the information system is completed, most employees still don't know how to use information and how to make it valuable. Enterprise's information system has no significance and value of management and maintenance. Therefore, comprehensive enterprise information resource planning is also an important part of IT planning. Fourth, the IT governance scheme is a mere formality, which can not play the role of "three-point technology and seven-point management". IT governance or IT management must be included in the IT planning scheme, which may involve enterprise management just like the previous questions. Because IT is still a new thing for domestic enterprises, it is difficult for enterprises to accumulate good experience in IT management, and the personalized problem of domestic enterprise management is more prominent. Therefore, if we can't understand the corporate culture, IT development background, management operation mode and other issues well, IT management systems such as IT organization system, IT management system, IT management process and IT performance evaluation will only fall on paper and cannot be implemented. At the same time, for a long time, the IT department of an enterprise often acts as the cost center and service organization of the enterprise, with unlimited responsibility and little power. When problems arise, IT departments mostly compromise with business departments, which increases the difficulty of IT management. Therefore, how to combine the actual situation of enterprises, formulate "less but better" instead of "big and comprehensive", and the operable IT governance scheme is the key to IT planning. Fifth, there is insufficient understanding of the importance of IT planning and insufficient investment in resources. This problem is a non-technical and management problem, but it is often the most important one. Many enterprises make IT planning with good intentions, and realize that it is impossible to carry out information construction without following the steps of "overall planning, step-by-step implementation and key application". However, in the actual project operation, due to various reasons, the project amount is small, the time is tight, the investment is small, and the content is complete. Of course, this phenomenon may also be caused by some irresponsible consulting companies and become a business-driven project. In this case, it is bound to cause the project operation to be superficial and comprehensive, but it can't go deep, and finally it is difficult to put forward a feasible action plan for the enterprise. Everyone knows that "ass decides brain", so adequate resource input is also the basic guarantee for pragmatic IT planning projects. Here, if you want IT planning to be more pragmatic, you first need to understand what IT planning can do for the enterprise in combination with the actual situation of the enterprise. How to truly support the strategy, management and operation of enterprises? The author's point of view is that IT planning may not need SWOT analysis, Boston matrix analysis and competitive situation analysis, which are what strategic planning needs to do, and we can't help but distinguish between red and white. What IT planning should do is to define the enterprise's strategy, then find the business development strategy that supports the realization of the strategy, and then decompose it into all business links in the core value chain to see what capabilities these business links need to support these business development strategies. At the same time, it analyzes which business links need IT system to help them realize these capabilities, and explains what IT system should do to make business links have these capabilities. In this way, we can decompose how it supports business operations, and then support corporate strategy. Take a case I consulted, for example, the customer is in the highly competitive clothing industry. To achieve the goal of building an excellent clothing enterprise for customers, we must constantly satisfy consumers' pursuit of fashion and respond to the ever-changing market demand. This requires enterprises to establish a rapid response business strategy, which is not only the rapid response of all business links, but also the rapid response of the entire value chain and even the entire supply chain. Then it can be analyzed that in order to support this rapid response business strategy, all business links (including R&D, procurement, production, distribution, etc. ) IT is necessary to realize real-time information sharing and strengthen the coordination of plans (of course, other capabilities are also needed), and these two points are exactly what IT systems are good at, so as to effectively find the supporting points of IT, then conduct detailed demand analysis and complete the design and implementation planning of application systems. Secondly, IT planning needs to start from the source of IT application and find out what information the enterprise needs. Where does this information exist? Through which channels can I get it? How to analyze, process, store and disseminate this information? What impact does this information have on the enterprise? How do enterprises know which channels provide valuable information and which channels provide low-value information? How do enterprises adjust information channels? So as to further help enterprises to build a reasonable information resource system and information coding system, and provide a complete information content solution combined with IT demand analysis, and provide practical basic support for the implementation of information systems in the future. At the same time, by formulating standards for information classification, storage, transmission and use, forming norms and systems, applying corresponding IT management means, including incentive mechanism and performance appraisal, standardizing the processing of information content, and truly realizing the significance and value of enterprise informatization construction. Then, if IT planning is to be pragmatic, IT is necessary to carefully analyze IT application systems suitable for enterprises, especially large IT application platforms (such as ERP and SCM). According to the characteristics of industry and business, we need to find out several mature software vendors and make an objective comparative analysis. The analysis contents include platform maturity, platform technical scheme, successful cases of related industries, vendors' ability to implement services, localization development and service capabilities, and cost performance. Due to the complexity of large IT application systems, it is necessary to start with the details in comparative analysis, and it is best to help enterprises form the functional requirements specifications of each module, so that targeted system testing and Demo demonstration can also be carried out. In the future, enterprises will choose information symmetrically to the greatest extent, realize rational regression, and not be confused by the concepts and relationships of software suppliers. Here, providing the overall software selection service for enterprises is also a pragmatic aspect of IT planning. Finally, IT planning should dig out the root of IT management problems when constructing enterprise IT management system, and consider the feasibility of enterprise popularization and application to form simple and feasible solutions for enterprises to implement. Take the author's consulting case for example. The data on the customer application system is always inaccurate. The business department complains all day that the IT department is not doing well and the system is unreliable. IT is not as good as the original manual operation, warning the IT department that if it does this again, they will not need the system. The IT department is very nervous, and is busy all day with how to set permissions, record logs, track and analyze, and prompt the system, trying to solve the problem of inaccurate data through technical means, and later finding that the problem cannot be solved. Through investigation and interview, IT is found that only IT department employees are responsible for the evaluation index of system data accuracy, and there is a corresponding reward and punishment mechanism. However, the operators and business directors of various business departments who actually use the system will not affect their personal interests because of the inaccurate system data. In this way, when they enter and modify data, they appear very casual, and sometimes they even deliberately make the data inaccurate to cover up some problems in their work. Later, the problem of inaccurate data was solved by adjusting the assessment indicators, strengthening supervision and control, and formulating a flexible reward and punishment mechanism. Therefore, when designing an IT management system, we should start from these practical problems and design feasible solutions, so that business departments and IT departments can form the same interest body, turn one-way services into partners, and make information systems produce the greatest benefits within the enterprise. Otherwise, the designed IT management system will be useless. At present, the informatization construction of domestic enterprises has experienced ups and downs, and some achievements have been made and some lessons have been accumulated. On the whole, there is still a long way to go. As the weather vane of enterprise information construction, IT planning is as important as the prescription given by doctors to patients. However, a good doctor can cure the disease, while a mediocre doctor can't cure it, but it may delay treatment and turn a minor illness into a serious one.