Strategic Planning and IT Planning - Essay Example

All planning practices may be motivated by systematic determination to yield fundamental actions and decisions that can guide and shape organizations or businesses. Strategic planning aims at developing specific, solid road maps or plans that can manage a firm and the necessary tools required to manage or start one. Some critics, however, insinuate that some of the effectiveness of strategic planning has faded slowly. Most managers luckily enough are still aware of the importance of implementing effective strategic planning. Flemming (2012) notes that strategic planning demands a lot of time and attention and if the principles are not followed to the letter then it can be very frustrating. On the other hand, if conducted correctly they can help a company to identify its effective point within the industry.

            Several perspectives and model approaches are used to implement strategic planning. The implementation and development of the various tools depend on a variety of factors like the organization’s culture and leadership, the organization’s size, complexity, and nature of the business environment. For example, a firm may start using the same matching baselines as Wal-Mart and McDonald but at a certain period in the progress, it will need to make vital changes and assimilate its strategies (Druck, 2011). The same applies to general principles relating to IT planning, general principles are very effective but will only take a firm to a certain point.

            Ten years ago, system and process integration could have been eliminated and abolished from strategic planning. This is because critics had predicted that this would form an IT platform structure that would major in the business sector. Currently, the level at which a company carries out IT system integration determines the success level of the strategic plans and the consistency of long-term goals. The system integration methods are crucial if a firm aims at achieving division, process, and departmental synchronization that is a vital element in accomplishing strategic goals (Flemming, 2012). Strategic planning and IT planning are continuously converging to ensure a company achieves its set strategic objectives and goals.

            The difference between strategic planning and IT planning is continually narrowing; nevertheless, it has the dual task of continual improvement and cost reduction of process performance. IT in recent days has been noted to be a vital element in the strategic planning process for most business-oriented firms due to the many technological advancements and changes that are so often. Strategic planning and IT planning are increasingly diverging in the field of technology, emphasizing and increasing this becomes the ultimate extent of divergence. Therefore, IT planning will continuously focus on the adoption of technology to support applications and legacy systems and still focus on the purchasing of new systems to gain a competitive advantage. IT is given the challenging responsibility of accomplishing all these tasks of focus and simultaneously time managing investment to reduce costs.