The Methodology of Information Technology Strategic Planning for Electricity Distribution Industry with a Focus on Information Technology Infrastructure Library

Abstract

Strategic planning plays a key role in the future success of organizations. Information technology as an emerging field in Iranian organizations requires strategic planning to succeed. In this study, after a systematic review of the IT strategy development methods and the evolution of these approaches, an indigenous approach is developed to develop the IT strategy of the distribution companies. This method is a quantitative-qualitative hybrid. During this five-phase study, the organization's cognition is based on the information architecture of processes, and then based on the business and IT alignment perspective, achieving optimal status in information technology infrastructure library as one of the business and information technology alignment methods with the IT governance approach, is followed. By matching the business processes of the electricity distribution and information technology infrastructure library, the status quo and the desired status in each process were determined based on the opinions of business experts. Accordingly, the processes of service continuity management, service catalog management and service portfolio management were the most distant from the desired situation, and for the other processes the same gap analysis was performed. Based on the distance analysis, appropriate strategies were provided for each of the information technology infrastructure library processes according to the best practices.

Keywords

• strategic planning
• information technology
• information technology infrastructure library