Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila

Intramuros, Manila

Systems Strategy

Torres, Bea Gale V.

BSA 4-3

Systems Strategy is developed to address the organizations

technological means in terms of systems development. It is a comprehensive plan
that I.T. professionals use to guide their organizations.

A System Strategy should cover all facets of technology management,

including cost management, human capital management, hardware and software
management, vendor management, risk management and all other considerations
in the enterprise IT environment. Executing a system strategy requires strong IT
leadership; the chief information officer (CIO) and chief technology officer (CTO)
need to work closely with business, budget and legal departments as well as with
other user groups within the organization.
An article from CIO magazine, Strategic Systems: Beneath the Buzz
discusses the way the very term strategic systems is beginning to lose its
meaning. Ever since the word came into popular usage in business and IT
management circles it has come to be applied to many projects, almost just for the
sake of using the term. Instead of projects being necessarily strategic, they are
simply called such so it sounds efficient and practical-the fact is there is little
attention being paid any longer to what it means. According to the article, its
imperative that IT and business leaders know what truly is strategic in order to
focus scarce resources on really important, high-payoff initiatives. The article
defines strategy from a business perspective as a comprehensive plan of action to
achieve a goal. With this definition in place, it puts the term in the context of a
business and relates how strategies are important for businesses and how they help
to achieve a particular set of goals. This is further broken down into a definition for
IT and another for business with the common idea that competition drives strategy.

Assess Strategic Information Needs

Prerequisite to systems planning:
1. It outlines an organizations overall direction, philosophy, and purpose;
2. It examines its current status in terms of its strengths, weakness, opportunities,
and threats;
3. It sets long-term objectives; and
4. It formulates short-term tactics to reach them.

Strategic Systems Planning (SSP) is undertaken to develop a Strategic

Systems Implementation Plan. The objective of the plan is to take action to
implement the Strategic Systems identified during the SSP project. To ensure the
action plan is implemented:
The Strategic Systems Implementation Plan must be action oriented, and the
actions must be measurable.
The SSP project must be owned and directed by the user community. Ideally the
project director should be recruited from the organization's executive. The IS
department should not be the driving force behind the SSP project.
The organization must have a business plan.
Key decision makers must participate in the SSP project. This participation must
be structured and consistent throughout the project.
The SSP project must achieve the proper level of detail. At too high a level of
detail, the plan will give insufficient direction and will be of low value to the
organization. At too detailed a level, the project will lose sight of the overall picture,
take forever to complete, and will probably be invalid since it is too early in the life
cycle to make detailed decisions. Remember that the life cycle is iterative, and
there will be opportunity later in the process to complete the detailed analysis and
make the detailed decisions.
The Strategic Systems Implementation Plan must be a total plan for the
organization to support its business. This implies that key people who are required
to make it a success must have participated cooperatively in generating these
plans.
The plan must be flexible enough to accommodate the management culture,
management philosophy, existing investments and management style. This is
especially important in order to be successful in obtaining commitment to proceed.
The SSP project must have the technology expertise required to develop a solid
technology platform. However, technology expertise does not guarantee success.
The SSP project must focus on quality rather than quantity.

 The Strategic Systems Implementation Plan developed during the SSP project
must be refreshed annually to ensure the plan remains achievable and strategic.

Benefits of Strategic Systems Planning

The strategic systems planning process provides many benefits to the organization.
The process:
Enables senior management to view the enterprise in terms of key business
functions and data.
Identifies information and systems needed to support the business priorities.
Establishes a technology platform and a framework for information systems
development.
Anchors system development to business plans.
Sets priorities and expectations for systems projects.

Legacy System
A legacy system, in the context of computing, refers to outdated computer systems,
programming languages or application software that are used instead of available
upgraded versions.
Typical solutions in managing legacy systems include: discarding the system and
building a replacement one; freezing the system and using it as a component of a
new larger system; modifying the system to give it another lease of life.
Modifications may range from a simplification of the system (reduction of size and
complexity) to ordinary preventive maintenance (redocumentation, restructuring
and reengineering) or even to an extraordinary process of adaptive maintenance
(interface modification, wrapping and migration). These possibilities are not
alternative to each other but making decisions on which approach, or combination
of approaches, is most suitable for any particular legacy system are usually taken
on the basis of conventional wisdom. Like any decision process, it requires that

critical information depicting the state of subject systems is available to the

management, to make valid decisions. In these cases, both technical and economic
aspects of subject systems must be assessed in order to justifying each decision.

Developing an architecture description

Systems Architecture is a response to the conceptual and practical difficulties in the
description and the design of complex systems. Systems Architecture can refer to:
The architecture of a system, i.e. a model to describe/analyze a system
Architecting a system, i.e. a method to build the architecture of a system
A body of knowledge* for "architecting" systems while meeting business needs,
i.e. a discipline to

master systems design.

* consisting in: concepts, principles, frameworks, tools, methods, heuristics,

practices

User Feedback
Determining the Executive Perspective - Executive interviews gain the
commitment of additional executives and help the study team understand the
problems whose solutions will be represented by the future systems.
Defining Findings and Conclusions - The study team develops categories of
findings and conclusions and then classifies previously identified problems into the
categories.
Defining the Information Architecture - The study team uses the business
processes and the data classes to design databases. The team prepares charts
relating the processes to the classes and the systems to subsystems.
Determining Architectural Priorities - The team sets systems development
priorities based on potential financial and non- financial benefits, the likelihood of
success, and the organizations demand for each system.

 Reviewing Information Resource Management - The study team evaluates the

current IS organizations strengths and weaknesses. A steering committee is
established to set policy and control the function.
Developing Recommendations and Action Plan - The team prepares an action plan
with recommendations about hardware, software, adjustments to current systems,
and methods of strengthening IS management.
Reporting Results - The study team gives a talk along with a brief summary and a
more detailed (usually very thick) report covering the studys purpose,
methodology, conclusions, recommendations and prescribed actions.

Balanced Scorecard Applied in IT Projects

Many organizations choose to formalize their information technology strategy in a
written document or balanced scorecard strategy map. The plan and its
documentation should be flexible enough to change in response to new
organizational circumstances and business priorities, budgetary constraints,
available skill sets and core competencies, new technologies and a growing
understanding of user needs and business objectives.

Bibliography

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/IT-strategy-information-technologystrategy
http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~golden/systems_architecture.html
http://www.iaeng.org/publication/WCECS2014/WCECS2014_pp168-170.pdf
http://www.techopedia.com/definition/635/legacy-system
http://www.di.uniba.it/~lanubile/papers/wess97.pdf
http://zulsidi.tripod.com/pdf/sisp2.pdf