A successful IT strategy requires both predictability and innovation. To get positive results, you not only have to do the right things but you also have to do them the right way, advises O'Reilly Radar CIO Jonathan Reichental. 

Processes for deploying and managing new technologies are every bit as important as the technologies themselves, but that part of change gets insufficient attention in Reichental's view. He offers a set of questions that should be asked whenever IT-related changes are made.

In the first year of IT transformation at Reichental's organization, his team spent a lot of effort establishing good processes to achieve the level of predictability he wanted. They focused on initiatives such as IT governance, service management, project management, change management and business analysis.

Of all these efforts, change management produced especially good results.

How an IT organization accomplishes changes is part of whether or not it is "world-class," Reichental writes. At the beginning of this year, his organization decided it would approach change in a very deliberate way. "We agreed that we would be hyper-judicious in the infrastructure changes we made. We became priority junkies. Every time a change was identified we asked questions such as whether it was a priority, if there were alternatives, and studied the consequences of not making the change," he writes.

"And as we did that, something extraordinary happened."

Not only did priorities remain the focus and the most important projects were implemented, but the infrastructure became increasingly stable. Some degree of stabilization was the result of improvements made as a result of the change management process. But it also was a function of avoiding unnecessary change.

"Change management was helping us make changes successfully and it was also helping us to determine what changes not to make," he writes.

For more:
- see Jonathan Reichental's post at O'Reilly Radar

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