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As we approach 2025, many of us are focusing on strategic planning for the upcoming year. If you’re part of an IT team at a small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME), this is the perfect time to reflect on where your company is headed and how your IT strategy aligns with those goals.
However, this year, we encourage you not to stop at your team’s assigned action plan. Instead, take a deeper look at your company’s high-level goals. While they may seem far-off, they have significant implications on your IT game plan. Or, rather, your IT game plan has significant implications on your organization’s ability to follow its path forward.
In fact, your IT infrastructure can make or break your company’s growth plans.
Many IT teams don’t consider this early enough. They end up deeply intertwined with tools that serve them now, but can’t support where they’re going. Locked in with vendors that don’t work the way they want to. Stuck with a pile of integrations so messy they can’t untangle them without breaking everything. We’ve reached a point where nearly everything a company does, it does with technology. So if your technology can’t support your company’s growth, your company can’t grow.
As an IT leader, the idea that you are the potential breaking point in your company’s growth plan can be scary. But by nature, make-or-break means you could also be the one who makes that growth happen.
Talk about a resume builder.
This blog is all about how to be a maker and not a breaker — how to be the one that sets your company up for long-term success. (We hope to see that accomplishment on your LinkedIn profile someday.)
We’ve broken it down into three steps.
1. Start with the End Goal
We know, we know — this feels a little like reading the last sentence of a book before you start it. (Blasphemy!) But as soon as you have a good sense for where your company wants to go, you can start making better decisions for both the short-term and the distant future.
Look as far ahead as you can to understand your company’s vision for the future. Ideally, this is clearly mapped out and you know exactly where to find it. More realistically, this might take a bit of detective work. There are many places where you might find some clues. Has your CEO provided you with a five-year vision? Does your company have plans to go public? Is there talk of onboarding new departments, or building out new products or services? These may all hint at directions for future growth.
When in doubt, ask! Demonstrating your interest in planning for the future helps highlight your role in helping your company get there.
In general, you want to be looking years ahead. Five or 10 years are common time frames for company planning.
What if my company doesn’t plan to grow?
Not every company wants to grow. Maybe you’re working at a local business that doesn’t plan to franchise, a company that wants to get bought, or a small family practice that’s stable and wants to maintain the status quo. However, just because your company doesn’t want to change doesn’t mean that the world around it won’t change. Rather, the world around it will definitely change — and your company will have to adapt to some degree to stay relevant.
For example, the little mom-and-pop shop down the street might still be just as quaint and untouched as it was when it opened. But if they’re still in business, that means they’ve probably modernized enough to at least list themselves on Google Maps and start using credit card readers.
Similarly, your company will have to keep up with technology as it changes. So, your job as an IT leader is to predict how technology will change, and what your company will have to do to adapt to it. Some things to consider include:
- Changes in customer and partner expectations.
- For example: Increasing expectations around fast, personalized, and round-the-clock service may call for AI-enabled tools.
- Emerging business technologies.
- For example: As the cloud solidifies itself as the business norm, legacy equipment will become increasingly outdated.
- Changes in the market.
- For example: The U.S. Career Institute expects entertainment and healthcare industries to grow the most in the next 10 years, and it projects a strong decline in many manufacturing and information subsectors. These trends may affect your company’s offerings and verticals, which could change its IT needs.
These are just a few ways your business may need to adapt to keep up with macro-level changes. Your specific industry, company plans, and personal experience will help you make more precise predictions for where your company’s IT may be headed.
2. Plan for the Short Term
Once you have an idea for your company’s long-term direction, the best place to start your planning is where you normally would — with the upcoming quarter or year.
But now that you’re equipped with your company’s long-term vision, you can make sure your plans align with those big-picture considerations. Even short-term plans can take these considerations into account. For example, complete digital transformation may be a lofty goal that’s years away, but it might influence you to choose a cloud-based option for any new tooling you need for next year.
3. …But Don’t Stop There.
It’s tempting to brush your hands off once you’re done with the immediate planning at hand. However, the most strategic approach takes things a step further. It looks ahead as far as it can, as dictated by its company’s overall vision. Often, this is about five or 10 years out.
Once you finish your short-term planning, we encourage you to keep going. See if you can draw a dotted line from where you are now, to where you’ll be in a quarter or a year from now, to where you’ll be five or 10 years from now. It’s impossible to plan this out play-by-play; there are too many dynamic factors at hand to predict anything that closely (the COVID-19 pandemic taught us that much). Rather, ask yourself what major steps will take you from here to your company’s long-term goals.
For example, your company might want to expand its offerings, serve a new vertical, or become acquired. Ask yourself what your company would need from its IT stack to accomplish these goals. Developing an architecture that’s flexible, scalable, and not locked into one vendor would be key to goals like these.
It’s likely that your dotted line won’t be accurate the first time, the second time, or even the fifth time you try it. The goal isn’t accuracy, but rather, to keep yourself accountable to your company’s long-term plan. If you practice this exercise every time you undergo planning, you accomplish a few things:
- You establish a planning North Star. Practicing this exercise alongside routine planning keeps long-term goals in view and prevents you from straying off course.
- You keep your plan up to date and pliable. As we’ve mentioned, your long-term, dotted-line plan is likely to change. Tracking it often and adjusting to changes frequently prevents your big-picture plan from becoming stale and ultimately unusable, which tends to happen when it isn’t frequently updated.
- You continually set your company up for success. By keeping your company’s long-term view in your sights, you enable your company to take the steps necessary to achieve its vision with minimal friction.
- You continually set yourself up for success. Approaching IT with a strategic, long-term plan is a huge career differentiator, both for your current role and for your future path.
Start Building Your Company’s Future
Planning never works well in a bubble. In addition to digging into your company’s future plans, it’s important to learn about how similar companies and IT professionals are approaching IT.
JumpCloud recently surveyed over 600 IT professionals working at SMEs about how they experience and approach IT. Download the free report to learn how your colleagues are approaching IT planning, along with security, IT budgeting, AI, and more.
