You're striving to balance IT strategy with long-term stability and innovation. How can you ensure success?

To balance IT strategy with long-term stability and innovation, start by aligning IT initiatives with core business objectives. Invest in flexible, scalable technologies that can evolve with the market. Encourage a culture of continuous learning and experimentation, empowering teams to explore new ideas. Prioritise strong cybersecurity and risk management practices to safeguard stability. Regularly review and adapt your strategy based on emerging trends, ensuring it supports both immediate needs and future growth.

Understand where in your environment that can benefit from the strategy vs where you need to maintain stability. Focus on value creation - this can be lower cost, better resiliency, new capabilities or greater insight and validate with your business,

While the global perspective of alignment of your strategy with org seems disjoint. You are part of org as an organisation each department has a priority and goal towards strategy. First u should know where u are and how u can drive the change in each part of ur org. As the saying goes one thing is constant in the world is change. IT should be the leader driving the change towards the goal.

IT Strategy articulates how an organisation will use Tech to meet its business goals, foster innovation, agility. Adopt below approach to ensure success: 1. Align IT priorities with business goals. 2. Translate into ‘what does success look like’. 3. Craft Tech investment plan, IT initiatives to contribute to long term stability, growth. 4. Execute IT initiatives adopting principles of: ‘Big vision, Start small (pilots), Assess outcomes, Fail fast, Refine, Scale rapidly’. 5. Scale at speed. Measure ROI impact. Communicate widely, elicit business feedback, 6. Continuously Learn, course correct IT initiatives to showcase Value, success. Periodically review the measures to adjust IT strategy to maximise outcomes for your organisation.

If I understand correctly, "striving" implies that you are diligently working to achieve a balance between IT strategy, long-term stability, and innovation. However, this suggests that the foundation might not be well-established. If the basics were in place, your team wouldn't be constantly putting out fires that could have been prevented with proper planning. Instead, you would have the capacity to implement new products, platforms, and cutting-edge technologies while remaining flexible and agile. And the basics? Aligning goals with the business and among IT areas; constant risk reduction; fostering agility with smart projects; having good people in place, and roadmap that could change, but at least your team knows where they are going.

My experience is that far too many organisations focus too much on the risk from outside, while failing to effectively track and assess the risk from within. Technical debt, operational risk and system aging are going to be far more costly to the organisation than a security attack from outside. The attack from outside gains a lot of immediate attention, but the gradual creep of internal risks that never make out of the middle of the priority list are what will slow activity, let alone progress. What's worse is they are 100% within the power of the organisation to correct.

Innovation inherently involves taking risks, but it is essential to manage those risks effectively. Conduct thorough risk assessments before implementing new technologies or processes. Identify potential vulnerabilities and develop mitigation strategies to minimize the impact of any adverse events. By proactively addressing risks, you can strike a balance between innovation and stability without compromising the overall integrity of your business.

Agility and nimbleness aren't always the silver bullet solution to every business problem. In most cases they can't hurt, but are they worth it? Microservices and domain specific software and design work well in banking and finance toward the front of the house, but what's the cost of making the Finance department more agile? When we talk about 'fostering agility', we should be making the best cost / benefit analysis we can. By knowing our organisations, understanding our market and communicating effectively, we will be able to highlight the areas that require agility versus those that benefit from something much more stable and unchanging.

Is it "Foster Agility" or "Harness Agility"? Many people want to implement new technologies or features to be more efficient, more innovative, more productive or in some other way more excellent at what they do. When I was in the media industry, broadcast engineers were doing cool new things - but they couldn't afford the time or risks of keeping the IT environment current. Ultimately the tech debt closed forced us to make emergency changes that had been part of IT's strategic roadmap for years. If we had been able to align on the innovations that meant the most to our business and then identify the critical path items in all of our technology strategies, we would have been faster and we would have executed better.

Agility is the key for sure, however it should not foster because of ever changing technologies but should because of business needs. Knowing forthcoming ever changing business needs should drive sustainable technology change. Having own architecture and strategy to implement technology in agile way and without affecting the present business needs, is key. I think concentrating on future business needs is key for sustainable growth, which in turn will bring about customized technology around our business. Technology should evolve as per business needs and not otherwise.We dont need to prove technology we need to get profits from businesses. Customization of technology in agile way will lead to sustainable overall growth.

Make sure you begin with a thorough assessment of the status quo measuring multiple KPI's. Assess IT systems and processes but also culture and communication amongst the departments, as well as employee incentives and morale (is there alignment to company purpose?) Where are the (potential) bottlenecks to implementing your innovation strategy? Which areas of the business show the highest Innovation/growth potential? Address these focus points as a way to execute your innovation strategy.

For many businesses, it makes sense to outsource technology expertise as it’s an ever changing landscape where you need advice from trusted sources that keep abreast of technology changes. Whoever you decide to work with, it’s likely to need more than one perspective to get a balanced view of infrastructure, business systems, cybersecurity and emerging technologies like AI. In any business though, outsourcing is not abdication of responsibility and is best used to inform, learn from and apply new technologies and strategies leading to success.

Look for people that have a balance between business and technology... its imperative that the professionals that you bring to your organization have good ideas for engaging technology with business objectives... analyze advantages of outsourcing processes but be careful with your core business processes... align the choice of AI tools with these core processes and be sure that you, in return, have added values of using these technologies...

My experience includes first identify opportunities, develop the proposal of new solutions (that includes innovative outcomes) with options, seek feedback, bring alignment with senior stakeholders and seek support, plan the delivery using phased approach and agile methodologies, start the work, implement and review/iterate on regular intervals.

In a previous role, I balanced IT strategy with long-term stability and innovation by: 1. Prioritizing core infrastructure: I ensured our core systems were stable and secure before pursuing new innovations. 2. Implementing incremental innovation: I introduced innovation in phases, starting with pilot projects that wouldn’t disrupt existing operations. 3. Aligning with business goals: I aligned IT initiatives with long-term business objectives to support overall growth and sustainability. 4. Continuous monitoring: I established metrics to monitor both stability and the impact of innovations, allowing quick adjustments. Result: This approach improved operational efficiency by 20% while supporting long-term goals.

Be sure that you have total control of your core business processes and total control of your data quality and recovery processes before including new apps or AI functionality...