Several years ago, I was on a long-haul flight back from the far east. I found myself sitting next to a senior executive from a leading strategic consultancy. This executive was on the way back from advising one of the world’s top commercial banks on corporate strategy.

At the time, I was heading up Enterprise Architecture, Technical Design and IT Strategy for the world-renowned architecture practice Foster + Partners and was leading a rather complex process of creating a comprehensive IT Strategy for the Practice.

During the flight, this executive and I shared quite a few ideas and thoughts on developing a strategy, whether it be an overall business strategy or a subset of it focused on Information Technology. Some of the common experiences we had shared, made me realise that the challenges I was facing were not unique to me and, in fact, were not unique to the more creative professional services companies. What became clear to me is that strategy is often so misunderstood that it becomes completely irrelevant.

The idea for this site appeared after I was asked to do a talk on strategy development for senior IT executives. I thought it would be a good idea to have some reference points available on how to approach IT Strategy “in real life” and how to manage the process of getting to a finished product.  I will be making regular posts on topics of interest with a view of building up a resource on creating a useful and relevant IT Strategy.