The Development of a Strategy
Before you have a strategy, you need a goal or a vision. You don’t need to be “visionary”, hardly anybody is, but you do need something your IT team should strive for. Vision is the starting point of any form of Enterprise A according to TOGAF.
The “Vision” Thing
The vision should be specific to your organization but doesn’t need to be unique. If you don’t have one yet, I can suggest you borrow one from TOGAF:
The data is the lifeblood of any organization. Therefore, make data available to anybody in the organization who needs it in an easy, fast and secure manner, whenever and wherever it’s required. Put the data at users’ fingertips.
Now you can craft an appropriate strategy for this goal. It should include “data fabric” and likely “data mesh” which are the keys to any enterprise data-oriented strategy.
Sometimes you can develop a vision from a strategy
Here is an example of a very generic strategic plan developed in 3 steps that every organization should have concerning the “cloud” but most don’t.
Let’s start with the most basic question in the IT domain today:
Step 1 – What’s the Future of Corporate IT?
One of the most obvious answers is the “Cloud”. But not many IT people understand Cloud implications, most only understand half-cloud, aka “hybrid cloud”. But “hybrid” is the worst of both worlds (on-prem, cloud). Here is my blog about it.
What’s the real point of the Cloud?
Step 2 – If Cloud is the future, is more Cloud better?
There is a very simple and unambiguous answer to that:
Step -3 Are All the “Clouds” Created Equal?
They certainly pretend so but really aren’t. The differences may or may not be significant to you but there are differences. Here is a quick summary of the big 3 Cloud Service Providers:
- AWS – the best choice as a E2E enterprise cloud vendor because its focus is holistic. It’s the most mature, offers the most services by far, offers the best discounts on volume, and offers different ways of accomplishing the same goal. It’s the leader in the field and the only provider where the cloud is the main and only focus.
- Azure – as always is “an also-ran” but a very good one. Microsoft doesn’t lead in anything, except Windows franchise and only because it’s their proprietary product. Microsoft offers an illusion that the clients love, it appears that it’s easier to use than other competitive products, and it is, but at the cost of not offering any options and often not even being able to fulfil basic use cases. Nonetheless Azure is ideal for companies that see the hybrid cloud as an end in itself instead of a stepping stone in the migration. In other words, Azure is good for one system at a time in migration or new system development.
- Google – I am not too familiar with it but the story is that GPC is best for developers. Therefore if you let developers choose your “cloud” then you’ll end up with GPC. Needless to say, you shouldn’t let your developers choose your “cloud” in which case you should go with AWS or Azure.
Finale – the Derived “Vision”
The vision for our corporate IT is to move our whole IT infrastructure to our preferred (single) cloud provider within the next number of quarters/fiscal years to decrease our IT spending to match our IT resource usage.
