By Loretta W. Prencipe

THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGIST'S role of aligning technology with business means that the CTO must be one-part strategist and one-part task master. If the CTO were to manage day-to-day IT operations without having a hand in development of corporate strategy, the enterprise would be left with a technology patchwork that serves not the corporate goals, but rather the corporate technology.

Chief technologists intuitively understand how IT must be included in developing long- and near-term strategic goals. But the questions become, How does -- and can -- strategic planning go from vision statement to action plan and where does budget planning fit in?

The tail wags the dog

Strategic and budget planning definitely play together, says Mary Stassie, senior vice president and CTO at Herndon, Va.-based government systems integrator DigitalNet. "I look at strategic planning as what direction you want to steer the ship. Budget planning is more tactical."

Strategic planning leads budget planning, says Joe Amor, vice president and general manager of Microspace Communications in Raleigh, N.C. "I see budget and operations planning as planning that occurs as a result of a finalized strategic plan. The strategic plan defines how much money -- budgetary -- and what infrastructure -- operations -- will be required to execute the plan."

Amor, who oversees operations and how technology supports and furthers enterprise operations, says his role in strategic planning is to "determine current trends and anticipate future market demand so Microspace will have the right service at the right time with the right features -- and all of this at the right price."

A CTO, says Mike Gioja, vice president of technology at Framingham, Mass.-based Workscape, "must really understand the business drivers and be able to articulate in business terms how new technologies could provide the company with a competitive advantage."

This must be in the context of fully understanding the industry landscape and reality of current business and sales issues. "Everything is a trade-off, and this requires balancing the short term and long term," says Gioja. "The CTO needs to consider design points for longer term needs in order to minimize rework/rewrites that could negatively impact the business model and ROI."

In a supporting role

Even as CTOs develop the technology road map to be folded into the enterprise's strategic plan, they cannot do so in a vacuum.

Amor says his company's executives believe that market research is never-ending requirement. "[Market research] must be a standard component of weekly/monthly job responsibilities -- and not just something that one does at the end of the year in anticipation of the upcoming year's plan."

Amor looks to both current clients and his company's account managers as extremely valuable sources of information required to put a strategic plan in place. "After all, both are vital participants in the market and are exposed to a variety of business-critical information on a daily basis," he says.

Stassie agrees and also includes field managers as important sources in developing a strategic plan.

Defining the cloud

Taking a vision -- a strategy from concept to actionable plan -- is more of that managing amid the chaos, something CTOs are familiar with. Still, strategic planning without resulting action items is little more than lip service.

DigitalNet's Stassie says her company develops a strategic plan document yearly, something that comes from meetings of executives and various managers. "Everyone walks from the summit, with action items -- with items that are tracked," she says.

Other companies are quite formal in their approach to strategic planning. Mark Minevich, now CTO of Marksoft Holdings, served as CTO of Next Generation in IBM's Global Incubator program. His division worked with a corporate strategy team a few times a year to focus on emerging business opportunities, conducting high-level strategic planning in the areas of strategic vision, offerings, core competencies, market intelligence, and value propositions. The team "performed a comprehensive market intelligence and market management study, validated by third-party providers and historical data points before the acceptance of the strategic plan," he says.

CTOs in complex organizations must obtain "support for a strategic plan from other CTOs and strategic planners in other divisions as well as an alignment with corporate strategy," says Minevich, who also is chairman of the New York-New Jersey chapter of the Technology Leadership Council.

But any resulting plan cannot be made of stone, says Stassie. "Technology is changing so quickly that long-term strategic plans are now two to three-year plans. The plan can't be a plan for plan's sake. It must be a living document."

InfoWorld