Your Guide to Creating an IT Strategic Plan

With a general IT strategic plan in place, you can start setting IT infrastructure strategic goals. Goals are important because they provide direction and motivation while giving you a measuring stick for success.
You’ll need both short-term and long-term goals to be effective in this space. For example, as a short-term goal, you may need some functional infrastructure for your employees to do their jobs as productively as possible. As a long-term goal, you may want that infrastructure to be flexible and scalable, so you can aggressively grow the business when you’re ready to do so.
SMART criteria are still the gold standard when it comes to setting goals. All of your IT infrastructure strategic goals should have the following qualities:

• Specific. Your goals need to be specific, or else you won’t have solid direction to work with. For example, it’s a bad idea to set a goal like acquiring lots of good technology. We have no idea what number is associated with “lots,” and we don’t know what makes “good” technology good. We don’t even know what technologies we’re talking about. Define all of your terms and use hard numbers for best results. Remember, this is how you’re measuring success, so you need to be able to objectively determine whether you’ve met this goal.
• Measurable. Similarly, your goal needs to be measurable. At the end of the goal period, you’ll evaluate your progress to see if you’ve met your objectives. If you have no real way to track this progress or if your goal is open to interpretation, the goal is not effective enough.
• Achievable. It’s a good idea to set goals that are challenging but achievable. For example, fleshing out a robust cybersecurity strategy for your corporation isn’t going to happen in the span of a day. Work with IT professionals who have ample experience so you can set realistic expectations.
• Relevant. Your IT infrastructure strategic goals also need to be relevant to your IT infrastructure and your high-level IT strategic plan. In other words, how does this individual goal play into your broader strategy? Is it helping you achieve your core business objectives?
• Time-bound. Finally, you need to make sure your goals are appropriately time-bound. You may have a goal of fully migrating to the cloud, but when do you need to finalize that transition? This helps you avoid procrastination and motivates you to achieve better overall results within the IT department.