Högskolan i Skövde

IT strategies can serve as key tools that move an organization towards its business vision, and towards growth and prosperity. Today, most large organizations have an IT strategy, even if these not always are used the way intended – if being used at all. Instead, strategies become “shelf warmers”, collecting dust in a manager’s office. The situation is even worse for smaller organizations, since they rarely have the competences needed to create the document, or the structure in place presupposed by research to implement and use the strategy. This paper reports on initial results from a small project on simplified management of IT strategies to enable true usage and benefits. We analyze the IT strategy content described in literature against empirical data. The result is a set of recommendations for firstly, industry in its strategy creation process; and secondly, research in giving indications of research gaps that need further elaboration.