You invest a good percentage of your earnings each year into your technology. From workstations to printing equipment, servers and infrastructure, training and new applications – technology is the backbone of your organization. So, technology planning? It’s even more important. You need plans in place to properly accommodate your growth and streamline your workflows and processes. What does that require? An IT Strategy Manager and some hefty collaboration. While few people actually enjoy attending meetings – with a few pointers you can streamline your next IT strategy meeting. Here is an outline for things to cover for your next IT strategy meeting.
- Review history and reports.
Your IT department should be carefully managing your vendors, new technology projects and technical issues. All of these things should be documented and reported by your strategy manager. This will give you, as an executive, the big picture regarding the state of technology in your organization. The conversation should be limited to 20 minutes, but span as long as 30 if there are significant projects, renewals or issues with regard to user training or IT support.
- Successes and Failures
Another important discussion is identifying exactly where your technology is falling short and where is exceling. Regardless of company size, there are always going to be things that you have to compromise on, since technology budgets are not endless. Included in this conversation should be security risks, frequent user complaints regarding the state of the company technology, and a short reminder of what’s going right. Support ticket response times, positive support surveys and other successes should also be included in this conversation. This will give you a good idea of what needs improvement and what is functioning well. This should also be limited to 20-30 minutes.
- Discuss the future and plan appropriately.
It’s not enough to discuss issues and successes and leave it at that – you need to have a plan in place. If the company is growing and the current infrastructure is in question, take this time to set the stage for the your company’s growing technology needs. Take the issues that you just finished discussing and come up with a plan for how to rectify them. User satisfaction comes from constant refining and improvement, which fosters productivity and ultimately more revenue for your organization.
Make your next strategy meeting productive by using this rough outline to guide your discussion. Remember to spend time on how to fix it any issues you’re experiencing as a team and celebrate the wins that you’ve experienced along the way. Technology is a continuously changing and evolving beast, so make sure that you have a team mentality when you’re exploring how you can improve your technology as an organization.
