IT strategy and business alignment
Last updated: April 2025
Strategy is fundamental to IT success. If you are part of an IT team, you know that IT is no longer reactive, but proactive and innovative. You protect the company from security threats. You implement cutting-edge tools. You are the go-to resource for technology questions, problems, and solutions. With strategy as the connecting thread, IT transforms from a supporting role to a meaningful, value-generating part of the business.
A clear IT strategy will include the overall vision of what the team aims to achieve, plus IT-specific goals and key performance indicators to benchmark performance and track progress. Most importantly, IT strategy clarifies how technology can help the organization meet its broader goals for growth or transformation (a concept often referred to as business-IT alignment).
This guide offers an introduction to both IT strategy and business-IT alignment. Keep reading or jump ahead here:
What is IT strategy?
At a basic level, IT strategy defines what the IT team wants to accomplish and the path you will take to get there. Strategy sets the direction for IT efforts — keeping everyone focused on the work that matters most and bringing order to long lists of tasks and requests.
But the best IT teams know that IT strategy is much more than project planning and budgeting. Rather, it is an opportunity to frame how you contribute to the overall business. In addition to maintaining and upgrading technology infrastructure, IT facilitates company communications, operational efficiency, and business security. A well-crafted IT strategy outlines how the team will provide better experiences to both internal and external customers.
IT strategy is typically led by the chief information officer (CIO), chief technology officer (CTO), or other IT leadership roles that have the best visibility into overall business needs and goals. But everyone on the IT team has a stake. After all, the entire organization uses the systems, software, tools, and data storage that IT provides.
The process of setting IT strategy involves establishing the team's vision and mission, forming strategic goals, defining the work the team will do to reach those goals, and measuring the impact on the business over time. In general, teams capture this with the following components:
IT strategy component | Definition | Examples |
Vision | A shared blueprint for the future — describing the essence of what the IT team wants to achieve. An IT vision statement should support the company vision. |
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Mission | Describes the approach the team will take to reach the vision. IT mission statements should generally answer these questions:
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Goals | Time-bound, measurable objectives that describe how the team plans to make progress toward the vision and mission. IT goals should help answer the following questions:
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Initiatives | Big themes of work that will help the IT team reach their goals. Initiatives are typically broken into phases (e.g., planning, architecture, building, deploying, and maintaining) and tend to be long-term, cross-functional projects. |
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KPIs and metrics | Quantifiable measurements to help the team and organization understand IT performance and value. IT metrics typically relate to work/code quality, reliability, security, efficiency, and team velocity. |
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In addition to these components, you might also want to consider the following when building an IT strategy:
Target audience: Who are our customers and what makes them happy?
Competitors: What innovative solutions do other IT teams offer?
Business model: Does our IT strategy make sense with the way we do business?
Team culture: Will this approach excite and motivate our team?
An example IT dashboard showing the status of strategic IT goals and initiatives created in Aha! Roadmaps
More examples of IT goals
IT goals are unique to each organization and industry. But in general, IT goals fit into the following categories:
Automation and integration: To improve efficiency, productivity, and how tools and platforms work together
Business processes and communication: To improve workflows and collaboration
Data and information security: To provide access to and security of sensitive information
Data center: To modernize data center facilities and adopt cloud strategies
Infrastructure: To provide core infrastructure and operational elements for the organization, including hardware and software
Risk management: To identify threats and mitigate risks
Self-service: To empower teams and individuals to complete tasks without reaching out to IT
Software delivery: To improve release management processes, deployments, and quality assurance
You can also determine broad goals for the entire IT department or narrower goals for each IT team, such as the help desk or software development group. Here is an example of how IT goals could relate back to a companywide goal:
Company goal | Cut operational costs by X% this year |
IT goal (department) | Reduce employee turnover by X% |
IT goal (data center) | Virtualize servers and storage to reduce power used by X% |
IT goal (software) | Automate X% of regression tests |
More examples of IT metrics
There are hundreds of IT metrics you can choose to track as KPIs, which makes it challenging to know which ones to pay attention to. The idea is to select metrics that tie to your goals. This is an iterative process — many IT teams adjust KPIs over time as business priorities and responsibilities shift.
Here are some of the most common IT metrics:
Agile metrics: Metrics that support lean processes, such as:
Lead time: The average time it takes to go from idea to delivery
Cycle time: The average time it takes to make and deliver a system or software change
Open/close rates: The average number of issues in production that are opened/resolved
Mean time to recovery: The average time it takes to recover from a product failure, system failure, or outage
Mean time to repair: The average time it takes to repair and test a system
Mean time between failures: The average time between repairable failures
Service-level agreements on uptime: The percentage of uptime an IT team agrees to uphold (e.g., 99.8%)
Average time to resolution for help desk tickets: The average time a customer waits before their help ticket is solved
Taken together, the vision, mission, goals, initiatives, and metrics comprise the strategy that informs every project or task the IT team decides to take on. Once the IT strategy is defined, IT teams move on to IT planning — where strategy informs details such as budget, timelines, tasks, and the IT roadmap.
What is business-IT alignment?
A robust IT strategy supports the team in doing impactful work. When you take it a step further, IT strategy can also drive broader business transformation.
Business-IT alignment is about putting technology in tandem with organizational strategy. It also means viewing IT as a valuable business unit and not just a support function. By coordinating IT and business goals, organizations can reduce costs, improve agility, and even sharpen a competitive advantage.
Think of everything that relies on IT teams, from security to hardware and the technology stack. Improvements across all these areas of responsibility, even small ones, can have a compounding effect on business performance and the customer experience.
Achieving IT-business alignment is an elaborate process. It is also work that is never "done." It takes a tremendous amount of ongoing coordination and communication with stakeholders, and it also involves creating roadmaps and reports to track progress. You might even need to think bigger than that and reconsider the way your IT department is organized overall.
Related:
How to structure an IT team: Product- vs. capability-aligned
Business-IT alignment can require adjustments to typical corporate team structures. That means breaking down silos to bring more visibility and strategic importance to the IT department — reorienting IT from cost center to business driver.
Two examples of this include product-aligned and capability-aligned IT team structures. Here is a quick overview of what each one entails:
Product-aligned IT teams
In a product-aligned model, IT teams are structured vertically by product and are responsible for supporting an application. This allows IT teams to work toward a common set of product-specific goals. From setting IT strategy that will enable what the product management team has planned to supporting existing technology, a product-aligned IT team is focused on end-to-end ownership. This structure allows teams to make decisions autonomously and move fast.
Capability-aligned IT teams
In a capability-aligned model, IT teams are organized according to a specific capability and may support multiple products and stakeholders. The benefit of capability-aligned IT teams is that (in theory) anything built can be used broadly. This can require immense coordination, especially within large organizations. But ideally, this structure leads to a more consistent user experience.
Many organizations utilize a combination of product- and capability-aligned structures in order to take advantage of each model's benefits. For instance, you might embrace a product-aligned structure for each customer-facing app and a capabilities model for back-end services like a payment system or customer database.
Every business relies on IT to operate and innovate. So no matter which team structure you choose, it is important to align IT with the broader company strategy.
