I have seen my ppl saying they work in IT Strategy but what confuses me is the definition of IT Strategy? Which companies do this work and what is needed to do it?If I know what it is I may have a clue what I want to do out of my boring job!!Thanks!!

There is no such thing as IT strategy ....

There is no such thing as IT strategy ....

Buy a laptop or desktop

So wht are these jobs calling for IT Strategy.. McK doing it (BTO). .. Booz doing it leave apart Accenture/ Cap Gem calling them one as well.........I hope this is not some term coined by headhunters to sell jobs!

What utter b*llocks again ZB

aj's answer of "Buy a laptop or desktop" summed it up."IT strategy" is a very broad (and broadly abused) term. It gets used to describe anything except operational, hands-on IT. Therefore pre-implementation decisions such as the following are at the heart of the work:* build Oracle vs. SAP systems* buy laptops vs. desktops* run an IT department for each business unit vs. a central helpdesk, vs. outsource the whole thing (i.e. the choice of operating model to adopt)The "strategic" element of the work lies in making decisions that are consistent with, and that support, the business strategy. However, most IT consultants have such a loose grasp of business strategy and are so overwhelmed by having to make independent decisions rather than follow clients' or SAP's instructions that any decision-making, even the choice of whether to have rich tea or digestive biscuits, gets classified as "IT strategy".

lol...thanks for the info fellas!I have been talking to few headhunters and they made this thing sound like CEOs position..!!Anyhow, i think if defined truly (dreaming!) it can be an interesting job.. guess McK is doing some such stuff in BTO (@McK)..Any thoughts?

What has been suggested does not explain IT strategy sufficiently.IT strategy is a long term planning for your organisation's IT sector to utilise IT for your organization's long term success. For example Capgemini's RAIN (short for RApid INnovation) is designed to help organizations discover, develop, and deliver sustainable new business models to create a Service-Oriented Enterprise (SOE).As you see IT strategy is at the heart of becoming faster and more responsive to changes in the marketplace. It can be an innovation driver than just a service.

"As you see..." Or not as the case may be.Note to the wise: consultants see through consulting BS

IT strategy is fluff that organizations try to feed you to attract candidates.It typically involves just project management office work to plan out the large system development back end work that organizations need. Not really strategy at all...

Strategy and the Internetby Michael E. Porterwww.cis.gsu.edu/~emclean/R0103Dp2.pdf...says is all

Reading that article, I'm not sure porter even knows what the internet is. To show how generalised the comments are, you could do a 'search and replace' and change 'internet' for 'farmers market' and that article would still read pretty much the same. But who am I to critique this master of the universe?

Hi,Last year, I have participated in IT strategy project, for an international organization. It consisted on:- IT diagnosis (review of the existing)- Evaluation of Implementation Options (soft & hard)- Elaborate Strategy and Plan (Transformation Map, Prerequisites to the ERP implementation, List of investments needed)

And what do you know of IT, program your way out a box, know about version dependencies, understand performance and capacity management do you.Chances are you leave that all to India as the Stoodents in the UK are all after IB jobs or pushing powerpoints, many a consultant I have spoke to on IT strategy would have difficulty formatting a hard drive and installing XP.May as well present 'Brain Surgery Strategy' as most of these muppets aint got the first clue.Word to the wise consultants, most clients now have a UK based 'Guru' to listen to your wafflings and ask the questions you cant answer.And SAP is not an IT strategy, even if you think it is :)

So here is the Q to all Naan likes ...!My business is based on a certain (non Object Oriented) technology, developed 10 yrs back. We now have to develop interfaces with our B2B partners. How should I do, which technology should I use and which vendor should I select so that everything is Scalable/ Platform Independent?Should I hire McK or Bain for this? If you answer correctly, you will know what IT Strategy is!Good Luck!

Neither. You need to hire <u>me</u>, Fool.

Hypothetically:1. Your current systems where is the data stored, and how is it stored/accessed.2. Workshops with your clients to discuss their systems and interoperability, their roadmaps and their architecture no point in creating a closed system.3. Look at what information you plan to pass/use for this you need an Information Architecture or an idea of what you have, whats coming in and whats going out.4. Security, who should have access and who should not have access, what levels of access5. QOS , if your &apos;clients&apos; need data, then work out a QOS with a teir of levels Bronze/Silver/Gold6.ReportingAn example could be as follows:You have a visual basic frontend or COBOL interfacing to an Oracle or SQL Server database, all the data you wish to share is stored on the database. Your clients, some run J2EE application servers and some run .NETThey wish to authenticate against a portal and pass/recieve their data as XML over HTTPSA quick fix to this would be to add a J2EE application server to your Database with JMS running a publish/subscribe model.The publish/subscribe model supports publishing messages to a particular message topic. Subscribers may register interest in receiving messages on a particular message topic and may also publish to these topics.You can control when you pass messages, to which queues and who has access to these queues. The data is passed using the JMS/SOAP standard and is the basis of SOA and folows a standard format that the clients can both read and interpret. Similarly you can program your server to read the topics you subscribe to and transform them / store them in your systems.The upside is your systems stay as is, and you add in a middleware system that handles the communication.Think of it like subscribing to an RSS feed, only automatically , rule based and with security.The Cost?These systems are free, and the programing required is very basic, however if you get any big consultancy in they will charge you £millions for this, and to think that I could get all this done in 3 months :)But im over here in hyperacrap, but not for long as im quitting :)

naanman is obviously some contract worker from india that is completely clueless with what consulting or it strategy is for that matterand a pretty bad contract worker at that too, because his solution to creating a way to interface different application servers to a database made no sense what so ever

Don&apos;t get too sniffy.Asking the question "What is management consulting?" will also elicit woeful, vague and shallow responses.

So obv Naanman has shown his skills and we all can judge! Approach is utter crap and he definitely does not understand the difference between B2B partners and clients!Anyhow, from my experience what I have learned is everything needs a strategy to achieve a long term vision.. be it IT, Marketing, Sales...! All depends on persons personal interest and how quickly he/she wants to make big money!!!Bottomline, IT Strategy is good but not sure if you get to do that in CG likes or not!!

Ah the right answer was that the client needs a strategy and vision, not an answer.

The world of technology is constantly changing. It probably seems like every day something new and confusing happens that you need to pay someone to fix or control. We&apos;re responsible for that. We do technology, and we intentionally make it difficult for people like you. That&apos;s how we make money. We make money because you&apos;re not smart. That&apos;s pretty much it. It&apos;s really easy too. When you hire us, we&apos;ll do our best to confuse you by saying stuff like "You need more double back-end XML nodes on your server stack or the whole system is gonna crash." And the only part you understand is "crash," which basically means "your sh*t&apos;s gonna be messed up." So you pay us. Because you don&apos;t want your sh*t to be messed up. No one does. Not anyone who&apos;s smart anyway. Our services include:Double back-end network XML monitoringWLAN Firewall drive redundancy supportCentralized TCP/IP XHTML hostingMobile ping deployment SEO complianceDatabase UNIX leveraging for OpenLDAP Basically, if you don&apos;t know what it means, we do it. So hire us. Because you&apos;re not smart. And you need us.http://www.duhcorp.com/clients.shtml

Yep I was taking the approach a bit far by discussing a losley coupled messaging system.I should have said.....We will allow your systems to talk to each other by introducing a magic XML cross folding matrice that automagically folds messages in the Web 2.0 space ensuring that you can guarantee each of your clients gets their reports whilst not intefering with the B2B transactions offering a scalabe, reliable and low cost solution built by experts and supported for 2p out of India by monkeys.I did note the person who so quickly put me down offered no answer, is this beacuse he is :A: StupidB: A bit slowC: A consultantD: BothYes I do work abroad and I work for halfwits that have no idea what their talking about.If the answer above seems closer to an answer you understand then you should not be in IT strategy, or if your audience think like you, ie: there is no need to teach the UK&apos;s young Engineering, Science, programming and everything should be offshored, then I offer you my apologies.Chin Chin...The Naan(By the way Mars, sharening them prior to frying solves my problem, but shrinkage is an issue :)....) the Naan, now a self employed man.What makes me special?I left as I needed to work for an IT company ....

im pretty happy today cuz i just go my apache web server to send back an html page on my client browser on port 8080so now i can start applying php and my sql ontop of it to extract rss feeds over the internet and render them into a custom made format over an odbc connection to my access database

Zb, still lubed?

Ahh back in the UK...I re-read the last idiot comment : &apos;a pretty bad contract worker at that too, because his solution to creating a way to interface different application servers to a database made no sense what so ever&apos;My question therefore must be to whom?If it made no sense to you and your an IT worker, then you are the talentless cancer that infects the IT industry. Go read up on &apos;Web Services&apos; young man.I assume ZB is still lubed, its sunday after all and those german dominatrices wait for no man...

This thread has nothing to do with management consulting. Tony - I think that you should seriously consider creating another "IT consultants" forum so the techhies have a forum of their own.

You would be supporting the CIO doing his job...