Public organizations are continuously seeking innovative ways exploit opportunities provided by Information Technology (IT) to deliver services more efficiently, interact more effectively and fundamentally transform their internal workings. Achieving these goals require the development of sound IT strategies which transparently link desired outcomes with concrete set of initiatives. In general, by considering the current IT capabilities and re-sources of an organization, the prevalent organizational context, interests of major stakeholders and the opportunities provided by IT, a strategic IT plan provides a roadmap on how IT will support organizational goals. Therefore, IT strategies of government agencies are expected to show how their social, political, governance and economic goals can be directly or indirectly supported by investments in IT initiatives.

Even when a strategic IT plan provides the required linkage between high-level goals and concrete initiatives, the process employed in developing such IT strategy determines its successful implementation. A good IT strategy process must secure the necessary support from stakeholders; communicate the strategy widely within the enterprise, align with financial and human resource strategy and allow for regular update of the strategy with changing environmental context. Frameworks to specifically guide government agencies in developing and implementing IT strategy processes are limited.

This toolkit is designed to assist government agencies in developing and implementing their IT strategy processes based on a prescribed framework. The strategic IT planning framework specifies a comprehensive set of processes for developing an effective IT Strategy which satisfies the relevant control objectives specified by the COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and related Technology) IT Governance Framework based on the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) technique. The toolkit describes the framework, provides concrete guidelines for instantiating specific IT Strategy processes from it and explains how to carry out major steps of the processes.

The toolkit is developed with a set of templates which could be used in implementing specific steps of the IT strategy process for a typical government agency - from stakeholders’ analysis through IT capability assessment and IT visioning and goals setting to development of concrete IT objective with appropriate measures and associated initiatives. Specifically, templates are provided for the following activities: (i) stakeholders analysis, (ii) IT capability assessment, (iii) IT visioning and goal setting, (iv) IT strategy development, (v) IT objectives development and (vi) strategic mapping of IT objectives.

The adoption of the IT planning framework provided in this toolkit is expected to enable government agencies attain an intermediate (COBIT Level 3 – Defined) process maturity level in terms of Strategic IT Planning. A government-wide adoption of the framework should enable the alignment and consolidation of IT strategies across the whole of government. A software system to support government-wide management of IT strategies and initiatives based on the presented framework has been developed.