Enterprise &

Interorganizational Systems

Part 2: IT missions & Strategy

WCIT Chapter 3&4

ISMG 6180/BUSN 6610:

Information Systems Management and Strategy

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Filtered Vision
▪ CIO Jerry’s story
▪ Tactical vs. strategic plan in fast-growing companies
▪ New revenue vs. good revenue: unclear target of increasing sales
▪ Long term vs. short term profitability
▪ Existing vs. new products and services
▪ Existing vs. new channels, customers, or geographies
▪ Organic vs. acquiring another company
▪ Filters are essential to planning
▪ Strategy is as much about defining what NOT to do as about what to do
▪ Less filters, low level of granularity and clarity for strategy development

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No “Internal Customers” of IT
▪ CIO: Take direction (passive) vs. challenge the status quo (proactive)
▪ Other departments: colleagues or customers of IT department
▪ IT has nothing to do with actual customers
▪ Internal customers: customer is always right
▪ Customer: people who provide funds to the company
▪ IT is also part of the business
▪ Words matter

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Projects don’t drive strategy
▪ Jerry is bold IT leader; he asks his colleagues: how IT had generated the list
of projects
▪ Response is the latest critical project instead of the most crucial project
▪ How to set and adjust priorities
▪ Economic look, competitor response, natural disaster, legal action, failure or success
of a product or service, departure of leader, new market opportunities, new data or
prototypes, acquisition or divestiture of business
▪ Changes of priorities → changes in projects
▪ Negative consequences of priorities → projects inconsistency: confusion and
frustration
▪ Jerry recognized the issues due to lack of strategic direction; his mission starts

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Mission Time
▪ Not a full-fledged IT strategy, but declare a ‘true north’ of sorts that IT
would align with.
▪ A single filter for the IT team to determine proceed a project or not
▪ Spread the words: IT was holding a planning session in order to
create an IT mission
▪ Feedback:
▪ Develop more customer-facing technologies
▪ Identify business processes that could be improved, consolidated,
or eliminated

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Jerry’s IT mission
▪ “Leverage technology to improve business processes and operations
to benefit our company and our customers.”
▪ Leverage technology
▪ “technology” is IT’s purview and thus the domain it can leverage
▪ Improve business processes and operations
▪ IT sees the business operations from the front end to the back end
▪ IT needs identify ways to automate existing processes, also to harmonize
and optimize processes; i.e., align IT activities to business processes
▪ IT can be the glue that brings the company closer together, improving
efficiencies and collaboration
▪ Benefit our company and our customers
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From Source of Insight to Substance of
Message
▪ IT mission
▪ Message to peers in the leadership team
▪ First screen to gauge the validity of the IT activities portfolio
▪ Advantage of taking a first step:
▪ moral high ground
▪ productive conversation with other department for clarity

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IT Mission at Google
▪ Google CIO: Ben Fried (May 2008~)
▪ CIO seems like the easiest of the executive position: not true
▪ CIO of technology company is surrounded by best technology talent
▪ Google is growing fast: need quick react from Google IT
▪ Need filter the priorities
▪ Google IT’s mission: “To empower Googlers with world leading technology.”
▪ Collaboration (internal and external) to know and support the needs
▪ Not following, but creating: infrastructure for competitive advantages
▪ Agile development methods: deliver projects and capabilities quicker

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Marriott IT: Vision, Mission, and Value
Proposition
▪ Vision: more general statement; Mission: specificity; Value proposition: further
▪ Marriott CIO: Bruce Hoffmeister – “Powering Marriott Through Technology.”
▪ Vision: “We are innovative business leaders powering competitive advantage
for Marriott and our brands, who anticipate technology trends and adapt to
emerging opportunities while delivering core functions flawlessly.”
▪ Vision and value
▪ business innovation: IT is the business
▪ IT as source of competitive advantage
▪ Forward-looking: identify and interpret trends
▪ IT’s core job: delivering core functions flawlessly

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Marriott IT’s More Specific Mission
▪ Anticipate technology trends and adapt to emerging opportunities.
▪ Collaborative both internally and externally
▪ Grow our industry leadership position with holistic solutions.
▪ Focus with limited additional components
▪ Deliver innovative technology reliably, predictably, and cost- effectively
▪ Certainty and professionalism
▪ Enable people to use information for strategic decision making
▪ IT enabled information for insight
▪ Create meaningful opportunities for IT professionals
▪ Invest in people
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Marriott IT’s Third Level: “How We
Create Value”
▪ Listen to our partners to understand business opportunities
▪ A good partner is a good listener to facilitate conversation
▪ Provide strategic insights to drive the right solution
▪ IT staff need understand the key metrics of business
▪ Be easy to work with; use clear processes and flexible thinking
▪ Repeatable processes to be agile and flexible
▪ Foster experimentation through trial and error, balancing risk with reward
▪ Ability to try things, to fail fast, to learn from trails
▪ See around the corner’ and advance future technologies
▪ Recognize emerging technologies

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Common Factors in
Other IT Missions
▪ Inclusive language: we
▪ Proactive stance: drive, actively
contribute, forward thinking
▪ Innovation: need constant exploration
▪ Business success: competitive
advantage
▪ Partnership: service, enable, partner
▪ Customer centricity: create value
through IT for customers
▪ Action-oriented: delivery, tangible value
▪ Accountability: transparency
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IT Mission Take-Aways
▪ Creating a mission statement: a good first step for IT strategy
▪ Missions and strategies → projects, not the other direction
▪ Value proposition of IT (financial value)
▪ IT as future assets vs. current role in delivering core functions
▪ Meaningful and prescriptive phrases
▪ Starting point to coax other divisions toward clearer strategies
▪ Describe how IT wants to behave
▪ Articulate where to put IT mission: metrics, recruitment, elsewhere

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Facilitating Corporate and Divisional
Strategy
▪ CIO is most adversely affected by lack of strategy in other divisions
▪ CIO cannot take advantage of other divisions’ valuable niche
▪ CIOs must press other divisions to develop plans
▪ Strategy creation: OGTM (objectives, goals, tactics, measure) framework

▪ A fiction case: Zircon

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Zircon’s CEO Mandate
▪ “The year of customer”
▪ From internal process improvement to external customers understanding
▪ SMART metric of customer-focus objective success
▪ Help to prioritize and plan resourcing of initiatives
▪ Provide a mandate for all functions to pursue and measure progress
▪ Summarize a strategic goal and desired end state
▪ Divisional plans are opaque and cause disconnection
▪ Undermines the overall organization’s ability
▪ Hinder the IT department more due to lack of clarity and granularity
▪ From traditional divisional silos to recent cross-disciplines efforts
▪ Cooperation, cross-functional exercise

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The CIO: Presumptuous or Logical?
▪ Divisional silos in Zircon
▪ Defensive about the idea that IT would intrude to facilitate conversations
▪ Presumptuous: who is the CIO to ask question about strategic plans?
▪ Place orders with the IT department
▪ Logic
▪ CEO’s mandate of customer focus
▪ Want to support the divisions by matching the business needs
▪ Need sufficient understanding of the business (e.g., Porter’s five forces
analysis)
▪ Focus not on IT
▪ Focus on actual business needs and business-value creation
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IT and Marketing: An Example of
Facilitation Using SWOT Analysis
▪ Collaboration between the leaders and experts of Marketing who produce the
data for analysis and those of IT who help them synthesize it (CIO and CMO)
▪ SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats)
▪ aims at identifying strategic themes that have the potential to evolve into strategic
objectives
▪ Strengths. Areas of accomplishment or sources of advantage for the company or
division in question (Internal)
▪ Weaknesses. Areas of disadvantage or not-as-yet-addressed gaps in the company
or division in question (Internal)
▪ Opportunities. A favorable juncture of circumstances that the company or division
may wish to exploit (External)
▪ Threats. Something that could cause future trouble or harm to the company or
division (External)

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Marketing’s SWOT
▪ Used to specify the industry’s needs
▪ Useful to develop simple statistical
analysis: current-state analysis
▪ Type-of-data categories for feedback
identification (4.2)

▪ In most cases, weakness column has the

highest total, opportunities is the second-
highest populated column (4.3)

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▪ The data types that have the
most feedback associated with
are good starting points for further
review and exploration (e.g.,
technology)
▪ Totaling comments is also a
useful check to determine data
types feedback for iterations (e.g.,
training)
▪ Depending on data size, save in
either database or a table

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Digest of SWOT Analysis Observations
▪ The company has not provided the right incentive to customers
➢ Develop capabilities to more effectively market to best customers
▪ A need for better customer relationship management processes and tools
➢ Upgrade processes and technology to make Marketing efforts more
efficient and effective
▪ The new hires into Marketing tend to be fickle
➢ create incentives for the best staff to remain in the Marketing department
➢ invest in better knowledge management processes and solutions in order
to document the most important information
▪ Technology weakness
➢ Upgrade technical skills and solutions in Marketing

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From SWOT to OGTM
▪ Create the strategic planning framework
(OGTM) after SWOT
▪ Objectives for Marketing
▪ Have solid foundation based on the
SWOT data
▪ For the foreseeable future (3-5
years)
▪ Tactics in the OGTM are not necessarily
IT-centric

▪ Figure 4.5 Marketing OGTM

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Commonalities with Other Divisions
▪ IT will have been a part of the other
divisions’ SWOT and OGTM planning
as well.
▪ E.g., Sales OGTM

▪ Commonalities between sample

OGTM from Marketing and Sales
▪ Strategic cascade
▪ how the OGTMs at the divisional level
should connect to the OGTM at the
corporate level, the objectives and
goals at the divisional level becoming
the tactics and measures at the
corporate level.
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▪ Figure 4.7 shows how
the two objectives and
their respective goals
shown in the
Marketing OGTM and
the Sales OGTM
might “cascade up” to
appear among the
tactics and measures
for Zircon’s corporate-
level grand objective

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A Real-World Example: Red Robin
▪ Red Robin CIO: Chris Laping (June 2007~)
▪ Restaurants industry: classic brick and mortar operations (1969~)
▪ Based near Denver, Colorado
▪ Disconnection between IT activities and organizational plan
▪ No integrated and organized strategic plan across the organization
▪ Disconnection gets worse as the company grew
▪ Revenue threshold tends to be an inflection point at which a lack of a clear
strategy becomes a significant hindrance

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Laping’s Response
▪ Series of steps instead of a radical reengineering process
▪ Developing a Cross-Divisional Forum
▪ Created a technology prioritization team (TPT)
▪ Brought together leaders from across Red Robin for conversation
▪ Developing a Vision
▪ Customer vision statement is the base
▪ Dug into guest feedback and consumer insight
▪ Laping’s Key Addressable Items (KAIs):
▪ Cravability: address the need to create menu items that guests craved
▪ Comfortability: help guests from across a wide spectrum of profiles
▪ Affordability: finding ways to lower costs to customers
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Corporate-Wide IT
▪ Consistent and sustainable growth and accolades by industry analysts for its
management team’s effectiveness
▪ Why CIO leads the corporate strategy?
▪ IT leaders need strategic clarity from the rest of the organization in order
to suggest what IT can do to bring each plan to life.
▪ IT leaders need strategic clarity to facilitate conversations about priorities.
▪ From OGTMs to Communication and Business Case
▪ Need smarter communications: understanding is the key
▪ Connect people with purpose
▪ Proposed project and the organization’s objectives
▪ ROI (return on investment) assessment

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IT as Partner
▪ CIOs need stop using subservient language in their daily lives
▪ Not customers, but partners with colleagues
▪ IT is not less important than other departments
▪ Reduce IT’s ability to challenge other colleagues
▪ Distance IT from the real and only customers

▪ Laping says: not partner, but advisor to the rest of organization

▪ IT’s advice is sought and taken into account before decisions are finalized
▪ IT enabled business transformation
▪ Be ambitious to grow further (become a CEO)

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Facilitation Take-Aways
▪ Be proactive in pursuit of a company vision
▪ Press the other divisions to develop clear plans
▪ Clarity and granularity in the plans
▪ Understand business well by using frameworks (e.g., Porter’s five force analysis)
▪ SWOT analysis based on strategic conversations with divisions
▪ Help divisions for big data analysis
▪ Gain insights from data analysis and help divisions for their OGTMs
▪ Strengthen the strategic cascade
▪ Highlight the importance of actual business cases and ROI analyses
▪ Be partners (advisor) with colleagues, they are not customers
▪ Aim high, be ambitious for your career development
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Thank You

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