If your IT group has mastered the alignment challenge and you have a history of success to back it up, you are probably moving on to the next challenge. At this point, the trick for IT is to help the business develop strategy, writes Nigel Fenwick, an analyst with Forrester Research. Business and IT strategy planning presents four major hurdles, Fenwick writes in a post at CIO magazine.

The difficulty begins with goals themselves, Fenwick writes. Oftentimes a goal is "so high level" that it's nearly impossible to define a single strategy for achieving it. Instead, the strategy ends up becoming a number of different strategies for a number of different sub-goals. "The cascading nature of goals and strategies causes a great deal of confusion because the underlying technology to support each strategy can be vastly different," he writes.

Because goals tend to cascade into sub-goals, executives tend to establish sub-level objectives rather than clearly define an actual strategy. Goals and strategies end up getting mistaken for each other. To come up with a real strategy, you have to figure out how to attain the goal, viewing objectives as steps along the way. If IT is going to be helpful in this process, you must know where decisions about the real strategy are made and develop a technology strategy at that level.

Too frequently goals are insufficiently specific and resemble aspirations instead. If a goal is vague, you can't know which strategy will work best. Goals not only need to be specific, but they also have to be measurable. A final difficulty lies in a tendency within the business units to define strategies as IT projects. Business leaders make a decision about the technology they want to use to achieve a goal before looking at all of the alternatives. 

The way around these difficulties is to make strategic planning a higher priority, Fenwick suggests. Delegating IT strategy planning to a couple individuals or tying it to the budget process doesn't give it the profile it needs. "Successful BT strategy planning requires support from an ongoing process and involves senior IT staff in business-unit leadership team meetings throughout the year. The reality is that, for most organizations, strategies continuously fluctuate with the ebb and flow of markets. Leaders adjust--and they need their business technology strategy to adjust to the realities of business, at the speed of business," he writes.

For more:
- see Nigel Fenwick's post at CIO

Related Articles:
Harvard Business Review's 5 steps to thinking strategically
Three steps to a business strategy
How to build an IT strategy on your own
How to make the strategic plan dynamic