My column on Tactical Deployment and Strategic Planning has appeared in the March 2005 issue of Connect Magazine.

For this to work, CIOs have to start differentiating strategic planning from strategic deployment. Large monolithic enterprise applications are both strategically planned and strategically deployed. In reality, businesses ought to plan strategically and deploy tactically. Organizations should be able to create strategic plans that don't revolve around a deployment project. Many IT shops use system deployment as their chief organizing principle and that's a mistakeit usually doesn't serve the business.

As obvious as it sounds, IT shops need to plan around business needs. This is just another way of saying that IT organizations need strong enterprise architectures. Enterprise architectures provide a context within which various groups can quickly and flexibly deploy IT services. Done right, an enterprise architecture allows decentralization of the deployment without a concomitant degradation in interoperability. This creates a way for tactical deployments to be driven by strategic goals and the result is a more flexible IT organization that's aligned with business needs.

From Tactical Deployment and Strategic Planning
Referenced Mon Mar 21 2005 08:48:17 GMT-0700