Research released by Pure Storage has found many businesses are moving workloads to cloud services but are struggling to optimise their strategy with on-prem still favoured by many businesses.

A few years ago, I wrote a series of stories on IT strategy development. It was based on my experience in developing technology strategies across several different businesses. But since then, I think there have been some big changes and thought a quick update would be worthwhile.

Back in 2013, I wrote a four-part series on developing an IT strategy. It’s an exercise I’ve been through a few times in my IT career but there was something I didn't have an opportunity to address back then. How do you breach the gap between strategy and execution? Here’s that guide.

With your high level strategy in place, it’s time to fill in some detail as to how you’re going to deliver. What else does the plan need in order to be accepted?

According to a recent post at Gartner, environmental sustainability is a key indicator of corporate performance. However, there’s a problem: there’s no standard way of measuring indicators in a consistent and universally accepted way. The good news is that the market is developing and delivering the tools needed for measurement.

Knowing and understanding the needs of your business is one thing but delivering them is where the rubber hits the road for IT departments. Translating the requirements of key organizational stakeholders into solutions is a critical element of your IT strategic plan is where your team’s technical skills and delivery capability can shine.

Yesterday, we started looking at the process of developing an IT strategic plan. The first stage was about understanding the needs of the business. Armed with that knowledge, you can now embark on the next step -- planning how you’re going to meet those needs.