Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
What is strategic?
Has long term effects
Dicult to reverse
Has major impacts
Support main purposes and
mission objectives
Figure 3.2
What is strategic?
“strategic” to everything important is as bad as calling every important
activity in a project “critical,” without knowing that project planners use
the term “critical” for activities, important or trivial, that are on the critical
path of the project's schedule.
Strategic requirements (Figure 3.2) have a few characteristics, including:
They have long-term effects.
Selecting enterprise software is a good
example. Making a choice to go with a particular enterprise soft-
ware means making a long-term commitment — these packages
can take years and lots of dollars to implement. Sometimes, smaller
decisions also can have long-term effects.
They are difficult to reverse.
Big technology decisions are often
difficult to reverse. Because everything is interconnected, the costs
of exit or change can be enormous. As standardization increases,
some of these decisions become less strategic in importance.
They clearly support main purposes and mission objectives.
A stra-
tegic project substantially helps the organization move in meeting
its mission. One might be able to do something important that one
was not able to do earlier, which could make a substantial business
difference. An E-commerce project set up to sell products directly
to customers is a strategic decision, if the organization always
wanted to go direct to the customer but could not afford to build
a direct sales infrastructure. It is also strategic because such a move
would, of course, impact existing sales channels — distributors,
dealers, and sales people. The harm in relations or credibility may
be difficult to recover from if the E-commerce site does not deliver
as promised and one has to revert to the regular sales channels.
