National IT Service Provider - Executive Coaching and IT Strategy

The national IT service provider has been an important player in its business segment for a long time. In recent times several changes are influencing the future positioning and success in the market: 

• Classical IT services are becoming a commodity and a meager margin business
• Native cloud providers, especially the renowned hyperscalers, are becoming an intense competition - especially if remaining GDPR concerns will be ruled out
• Even long-term clients are asking for more value-add services and a proactive exchange on IT and business innovation
• A declining inflow of new clients would increase the reliance on existing clients as well as represent a cluster risk
• The fight for qualified IT specialists is intense. Without an attractive employer value proposition, needed professionals who master new technologies and innovative approaches will be potentially missing 

Consequently the company has launched a tightly interelated business / IT strategy process and formulated a new IT strategy.

The goal of the project was to coach the IT executives on their new IT strategy and related topics, considering the following key points in particular:

• Understand and discuss the overall corporate development and the corporate strategy
• Understand the strengths and weaknesses of the current IT landscape, the IT operating model as well as the context of architecture, IT sourcing, the project portfolio, and business / IT alignment
• Critically review their developed IT strategy from different perspectives, such as topic prioritization, topic representation, and consistency 
• Perform a mapping and comparison against typical IT strategy processes and outcomes in practice

The following approach has been taken to develop the new IT strategy and a corresponding target IT operating model:

• Settings sessions with the leading IT executives and the responsible board member
• Understand and discuss the overall corporate development and the corporate strategy and implications on their IT strategy 
• Review their new IT strategy and additional key documents
• Workshop(s) with nominated executives to discuss the results of the external review and recommendations
• Co-creation workshop(s) on selected topics which will result in an update to the IT strategy

The project length for coaching the IT executive on topics and initiatives they are driving in the area of IT strategy was approximately 2 months.