Developing an IT strategy

By Redaktion techport.ai, IT-Beratung · Last updated on 21 August 2026

Most companies have an IT strategy. It is simply not written down anywhere. It emerges from the decisions of recent years, from the systems that happen to be there, and from whatever the long standing provider recommends. The result is a landscape in which every single decision was defensible and which nobody would build that way again.

An IT strategy is not a document for the board but a tool for daily work. It answers in advance the questions that would otherwise be reopened in every project: what IT should deliver for the business, which systems carry that, what you do yourselves, and how you measure progress. Once those four answers exist in writing, decisions take days instead of months.

How you notice it

Every project begins with a fundamental discussion that has already been held three times.
Management asks what IT actually contributes to the business and gets a technical answer.
There is a list of initiatives but no order that anyone can justify.
New requirements regularly lead to a new system rather than an extension of what exists.

Why this happens

IT strategies rarely get written because daily work is loud. Incidents, requests and projects fill every week, and the time to sit down and think about three years does not appear by itself. On top of that comes a language barrier: management talks about markets, margins and growth, IT talks about systems, versions and capacity. Without translation there is no shared target picture, only a wish list next to an inventory list.

How we go about it

Translate business goals. We talk to management and department heads about what should happen over the next three years: growth, new markets, new products, acquisitions, succession, cost pressure. From that we derive what IT has to be capable of, expressed in the language of the business.
Establish the starting position. We record what exists today: applications, infrastructure, contracts, costs, in-house capabilities and external dependencies. Added to that is an honest assessment of what will carry the coming requirements and what will not.
Set the target picture and fields of action. We describe the target state and the gap, structured into a small number of fields of action with benefit, effort, risk and dependencies. Each field gets an owner and a criterion by which success can be measured.
Set up the roadmap and the steering. We put the fields of action into an order that matches your capacity and define when and in which forum progress is reviewed. The strategy becomes a document touched twice a year rather than a folder on a shelf.

What you gain

Decisions that come faster because the fundamental questions have been answered once.
A shared language between management, departments and IT.
A justified sequence, and with it the option to postpone initiatives deliberately.

From our projects

In strategy projects we regularly find that the real gap is not between current and target state but between the expectations of individual areas. Sales expects a customer platform, production expects stability, finance expects automation, and IT tries to serve all of them at once. As soon as those expectations sit next to each other on one page, prioritisation becomes a conversation rather than a conflict. The second recurring finding: in-house capacity covers roughly half of what is planned. Saying that early saves a year of delay reports.

Häufige Fragen

How long should an IT strategy be in a mid-sized company?

Twelve to twenty pages is enough, half of that appendices. The core consists of the target picture, five to seven fields of action and a roadmap across three years. Anything beyond that is rarely read and even more rarely updated.

How often does the strategy need revising?

Once a year with a short look at progress and assumptions, and fundamentally every three years. In addition, whenever the business changes: acquisitions, new sites, the loss of a major customer or a change in management.

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