Overview
The purpose of this document is to provide the insights into Information Strategy. This document provides the holistic view of the challenges that various industries have at present and on the opportunities and capabilities that Information Strategy brings on board and can be tapped to have larger benefits- for businesses as well as for their customers.
Information Strategy and Its Importance
Organizations produce various Products and Services for their end customers and consumers. These products/ services may or may not be of unique characteristics, capabilities or quality standard. However, to have a competitive edge over their equivalent peers in the market, it becomes of paramount importance that the organizations set their vision, define strategy and long-term planning to achieve their business goals.
Information Strategy being the outcome of organizational strategic management, empowers the organizations to have a greater governance over information and business data and its management. It thereby plays a vital role in achieving strategic objectives.
The Information Strategy carries the strategic vision and mission of the organizations at the core and hence becomes one of the important means that helps to realize the defined business objectives.
Strategic Vision and Challenges
Organizations define their strategic vision to describe where the organization would head in the future. The Strategic vision details a practically achievable future state of the organization. The strategic vision is time bounded to attain defined future state of an organization.
Organizations face major challenges while implementing defined strategies that helps them in achieving strategic vision. The major challenges are listed below:
- The major challenge begins with having a poorly defined or over ambitious strategy that becomes almost unachievable when its implementation unfolds.
- Identification of appropriate resources is the key to achieve any strategic initiative. The challenge begins when the appropriate resources are not identified or onboarded in abundance to plan and execute strategy implementation.
- Once the strategy is defined with utmost benchmarked measures, it is equally important to define a communication plan and initiate that with the top down approach as lack of communication between the teams can fail the organizational strategy.
- If there are no defined indicators setup to measure the progress and ultimately the success of the work being done, chances are high that the implementation of the strategic initiative would not be successful.
- The organizations develop a particular way of working through the time and keep working following the defined procedures. Strategy implementation comprises an element of change for the better future of the organizations, reluctances to adopt to the same may fail the strategic objective and thereby vision.
How Information Strategy fits-in?
Organizations define their Strategic Vision to get and provide a sneak peek into the idealistic future of the company. The defined vision normally comprises of key elements such as values, ambitions, inspiration and business goals.
The organizational strategy establishes the direction that should be taken to achieve the vision of the organization. The ever-evolving times bring in unprecedented challenges before the organizations to sustain and remain competitive in line with varying market demands. This calls for the businesses to take informed decisions so as to remain cost efficient while attaining the enhanced product excellence.
The Information Strategy being the integral part of defined organizational strategy plays a major role with the provision of distinguished capabilities as below:
- Capabilities to identify and determine the business information which is crucial and should be considered as key for the functioning of the businesses.
- Provision of advanced insights into the present business performances with reference to the defined KPIs which are ultimately tied up with strategic vision.
- Capabilities to assess current organizational state in terms of business operations and management by reviewing business needs, assessing the business functionalities, analyzing technical capabilities and providing the impact analysis with reference to the chalked out future state.
- Tools and techniques to review the scope of change in business functions, Fit- Gap analysis, identification and analysis of options and providing best suited recommendations.
- Capabilities in defining future state business functions, identifying constraints, identifying assumptions, identifying and defining potential business values and setting up proposed future business state.
- Capabilities to define, control and govern the standards and principles defined for securing the organizational data and information to uphold the organization’s integrity and ultimately its value, reputation and position in the market.
Information Strategy: Leading Practices
The Information Strategy empowers the businesses to ensure that the right information reaches to the right business teams in the right time enabling to take them informed business decisions. There are the leading practices that make this happen even in very complex business environments, a few are listed as below:
·Driven by the Business Strategy
The Information Strategy should be driven by the defined business strategy. This practice ensures that information strategy objectives are and remain tightly coupled to what are established by the Business strategy.
·Enablement of new and different business strategies by Information Strategy
The established Information Strategy should always take the direction through which it can enable the changes that might happen in the defined business strategy. The information strategy should be scalable enough to accommodate and enable such evolving business strategy needs.
·Centralized Governance of Business Data
The Data is the real asset of an organization. The leading practice of information strategy calls for the establishment of the data governance practices attaining central control over the business data and ensure its adherence to the benchmarked standards to keep the data integrity intact.
·Taxonomy Formulation across Businesses
The taxonomy should be defined while implementing information systems as per defined strategy. This ensures that businesses onboard on common terminologies for the common concepts enabling efficient information exchanges.
·Enterprise level definitions of Information Strategy and Systems
When the Information Strategy and Systems are defined at enterprise level, it facilitate to have better control and governance over the information management capabilities across the organizational units and businesses.
·Enhanced Security of Systems and Information
As the businesses evolve through the digital edge embracing inevitable need to advance their information strategy and systems, the existing information security standards and protocols must be reassessed periodically. This enables organizations to adopt for the better product and services to ensure the business information remains secure from the outside threats.
