Achieve Success with Strategic Planning and Technology Integration in 2025

These days, IT strategy and business goals should go hand-in-hand; however, as a top 501 Managed Services Provider (MSP), we recognise that numerous businesses struggle to align these strategies and goals.

Failing to align IT strategy with business goals could be holding your business back. It could, ultimately, be the difference between a business smashing its targets or falling by the wayside from a goals perspective.

My name is Michael Hamer, Client Strategy Director at Netitude. Today, I intend to emphasise the importance business leaders and decision-makers should place on their IT strategy to boost their organisation in the new year.

Understanding Business Goals

First, let’s find out what a business goal is to determine the most common examples. Leading global employment specialists Indeed stipulate that business goals are “accomplishments your company would like to achieve within a defined time frame”. These goals can vary widely depending on the organisation's priorities and industry.

Still, they typically include objectives such as increasing revenue, expanding market share, improving customer satisfaction, and enhancing operational efficiency - basically, any objective that is aimed at helping the company succeed.

Importance of Business Goals

Setting business goals is vital for a business wanting to reach new heights. Having tangible targets provides direction and focus for an organisation from top to bottom, meaning each department and area can strive for success, whatever that looks like for them.

If a company sets clear goals, it’ll also have the luxury of being able to:

• Measure Progress: Every business wants to feel like it’s progressing in the right direction. Goal setting is a great way to measure how much progress is being achieved across the organisation. For instance, if a company sets a goal to increase sales by 20% within a year, it can track monthly sales data to see if it is on target. This helps identify areas that need improvement, provides a clear benchmark for success, and motivates employees to stay focused on achieving the set objectives.
• Align efforts across teams: A successful business will want its workforce to work in unison, ensuring they know each department’s performance so everyone can collaborate effectively towards common goals. This alignment ensures all teams work synergistically, reducing redundancies and enhancing overall productivity.
• Prioritise Resources: With costs at an all-time high, reprioritising resources has never been more critical. For example, if a certain product range or service isn’t reaping the rewards as expected, marketing-based efforts and resources could be thrown at the underperforming product to give it the best chance of succeeding.

What is Strategic Planning?

If you’ve heard of the age-old saying ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail’, you’ll likely be able to grasp the idea behind strategic planning. In simple terms, think of strategic planning as creating a roadmap where you determine where the business wants to go (the goals it wants to achieve) and how it plans on getting there (the steps and actions needed to succeed).

In a way, strategic planning isn’t too dissimilar to planning a trip where you have the following elements:

• Destination: The business goals are essentially the desired destination and endpoint.
• Route: The strategic plan is your chosen route to get there.
• Resources: No strategic plan would be complete without allocating the required resources (people, fuel and time) to complete the journey.
• Milestones: Along the way, you’ll have checkpoints (milestones) to tick off to ensure you’re on track.

If your strategic plan includes all these elements, you can’t go far wrong!

The Role of IT in Business in 2025

The evidence that IT will play a significant role in the modern business world in 2025 is incontrovertible. Global managed cloud services provider Momentum states, "In today’s business landscape, information technology (IT) is everywhere. From small startups to multinational corporations, IT has become a crucial component of operations, strategy, and innovation.”

It would be very difficult to dispute this considering the growing influence of technology in the business and corporate worlds with the rise of generative AI, automation, and advanced data analytics, to name a few. These technologies are transforming businesses' operations, enabling more efficient processes, better decision-making, and enhanced customer experiences.

As companies continue to integrate these advanced IT solutions, the role of IT will only become more central to achieving business success and maintaining a competitive edge.

Identifying IT as a Strategic Partner

As Netitude Client Strategy Director and former Virtual IT Director, I’ve seen firsthand how vital IT can be as a strategic partner, supporting businesses in helping them achieve their business goals and company targets. Netitude clients have seen first-hand over the years just how many benefits can be reaped from integrating the right technology in the right place at the right time for their business.

Here are just a few ways Information Technology (IT) can support businesses:

1. Streamlining Processes: Perhaps one of the most significant developments in the technology sector in recent years has been the rise in automation. Whereas before, repetitive processes would have had to be done first-hand by humans, nowadays, automation and workflows can be set up to increase efficiency and eradicate needless manual labour for mundane tasks such as data entry, invoice processing, and inventory management. This not only frees up employees to focus on more strategic and creative tasks but also reduces the likelihood of human error, leading to more accurate and reliable outcomes.
   
   
2. Enhancing Communication: Technology can also play an essential role in enhancing an organisation's internal and external forms of communication. From an internal perspective, IT can positively influence everyday communications such as emails, instant messaging platforms, and video conferencing. Looking at enhancing communication externally, IT can facilitate a more positive customer experience by providing comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) systems and tools that can help businesses manage interactions with customers, improving both service and satisfaction levels.
   
   
3. Data Management and Analysis: The role IT plays in data storage and analytics has become increasingly prevalent in recent years as secure and scalable data storage options have become more accessible. This ensures that business-critical information is stored safely and can be accessed easily. Data analytics tools have also increased in popularity as businesses turn to them to analyse large volumes of data to gain valuable insights, enabling them to make informed decisions and identify any concurrent trends.

How IT Can Provide a Competitive Advantage

Sometimes, all that may be separating a company from its competitors is a simple process or technology one may have implemented, allowing it to have the upper hand on the other.

Here are five ways IT can provide a business with that all-important competitive edge:

1. Faster Time-to-Market: In business, the first one out of the blocks is, more often than not, the most successful. Technology can help speed up the process of developing and deploying goods and services, thus enabling businesses to respond to market demands rapidly.
2. Cybersecurity: Investing in cybersecurity-related tech could be the difference between a cyber attacker selecting a victim and not. Businesses with more robust IT security measures are less likely to encounter and suffer from the consequences of a cyberattack.
3. Remote Work Enablement: Remote work is a key factor that job seekers consider, with ‘44% of UK British people working from home at least some of the time’ according to StandOut CV in 2023. Therefore, a business can attain a competitive advantage over fellow organisations by investing in IT systems that support and facilitate seamless remote work.
4. 24/7 Support: More and more businesses are turning to IT solutions such as chatbots and automated customer service systems to facilitate a round-the-clock support service, which, in turn, can enhance the overall customer experience.
5. Providing Enhanced Personalisation: IT can also help enhance the level of personalisation that’s woven into customer communications by providing data-driven insights.

Why not take a look at one of our recent case studies featuring Lilleys Cider? We helped them restructure their entire IT infrastructure as they transitioned to a much larger site, giving them the platform to outperform their competitors and reach new heights.

Lilleys Cider: Client Case Study

Aligning IT Strategy with Business Goals

As a Client Strategy Director who’s worked in the technology sector for a number of years and with numerous clients and customers of various sizes in different sectors, I know just how important it is to align your IT strategy with your business goals.

In this section, I’m going to explain just how we, as a Managed IT Service Provider (MSP), would go about aligning our clients’ IT strategy with their business goals:

Assessing Current IT Capabilities

First, a business has to understand what its current IT is capable of before it considers implementing exciting new tech. Here’s where an IT audit comes in. This is essentially a comprehensive review of a company’s IT infrastructure.

During an IT audit, the name of the game is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the existing IT infrastructure so that the business decision-maker is aware of which elements can be kept, which areas need to be improved and which aspects need a complete overhaul.

If you’d like to find out more about IT audits and the value they could provide your business, please get in touch with our team today!

Setting IT Objectives

Once a business has grasped its current IT capabilities, it can set its IT objectives and start aligning them with business goals. We recommend first identifying your business goals and then seeing how your IT objectives can contribute to them.

If a business’s goal is to improve customer satisfaction and retention by 20% over the next calendar year, then investing in and implementing a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) system would be a suitable IT objective.

Alternatively, if the goal is to enhance operational efficiency, the business might focus on automating key processes and upgrading its IT infrastructure to support these changes. By aligning IT objectives with business goals, companies can ensure that their technology investments drive meaningful progress and contribute to overall success.

Developing an IT Roadmap

When the IT objectives have been set accordingly, businesses can switch their focus towards developing an IT roadmap. We’ve put together a step-by-step guide which will help you work towards creating your own in-house IT roadmap.

1. Define Objectives and Goals: If you’ve read the last two sections, you should have already considered which IT objectives and business goals would be relevant to your business. If in doubt, circle back to a company's strategic objectives (increase turnover, growth, etc.) and see how IT can support them.
2. Assess Current Technology Landscape: This step involves conducting a thorough inventory of current IT-related systems, infrastructure, and applications. Once you’ve pinpointed those, we recommend assessing each form of technology based on its strengths and weaknesses.
3. Identify Gaps and Opportunities: Once you’ve outlined your current tech landscape, you can conduct a gap analysis to identify the gaps between your business’s current capabilities and future needs. This is an opportunity to evaluate areas that may need to enhance efficiencies, reduce costs, and encourage innovation.
4. Prioritise Initiatives: Developing an IT roadmap can seem overwhelming at first, so it's crucial to prioritise the initiatives that are most likely to have the biggest impact on business goals, cost, and feasibility. Here, you can develop a portfolio of IT initiatives you could potentially implement and rank them based on which will drive the most value.
5. Establish Timelines and Milestones: As I stated in my analogy at the beginning of this blog, you need to approach strategic planning in the same way you’d approach a car journey. Therefore, breaking up a long, arduous car journey with regular pit stops (milestones) is very important to ensure motivation remains high and the overall plan remains on track.
6. Allocate Resources: Once you’ve determined which IT-related projects will provide the most value and you’d like to proceed with them, you need to allocate an appropriate budget for them. We suggest that at this stage, you consider which resources (personnel, tools, and technology) you’ll need to bring the project to fruition.
7. Implement and Monitor Progress: Now, it’s the exciting part; it’s time to start implementing the IT projects according to your roadmap. You can monitor project progress using key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success.
8. Evaluate and Adjust the Roadmap as Required: When you’ve reached the last step, it’s time to review the process and gather stakeholder feedback. Suppose the process has been successful, and you’d like to carry out similar roadmaps in the future. In that case, it’s essential to make necessary adjustments to the roadmap based on any changes to the business needs and technological advancements.

We hope we’ve been able to provide some of the secret sources we give out to each and every one of our clients, from the moment we onboard them to their umpteenth quarterly business review. Technology is constantly evolving; therefore, we must evolve with the tide and not against it as we strive to achieve ‘Growth Through Technology’.

If you need any assistance or have questions about the topics covered today, our friendly team of experts are on hand to help. Please don’t hesitate to contact us for support and guidance.