Improving IT Planning in 2010

Just finished reading Chris Curran’s article on CIO.com titled How to Improve Your IT Planning in 2010 – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership.  Good article with some survey results that are very surprising.  A snippet from the article:

Diamond’s Digital IQ research, in which we surveyed 451 senior business and IT executives of large companies, found that firms spend roughly 240 man weeks per year on planning and budgeting—almost five man years! Think about what could be accomplished with 80% of that time back in the hands of your senior-most leaders. Roughly 25% of this effort is geared toward collecting the project ideas, another 25% toward preparing business cases, and only about 15% on linking the initiatives to the strategic roadmap. Our study also found that the presence of a multi-year strategic roadmap is a strong indicator of company performance, but that only 37% claim to have a clear roadmap. So, to get leaner in planning a company needs to get a clear roadmap and spend more time aligning to it and less time on (tactical) data collection.

Emphasis mine.

Interesting results.  That’s an awful lot of planning for some awful poor performance that we see in most IT groups today.  What can we do differently?

That last sentence in Chris’ points the way. Instead of spending so much time with IT planning and budgeting, why not start looking at building a strategic IT roadmap that aligns to business objectives and much less time on gathering operational and planning data that may not have any real value in the planning process.