Your best-made plans

Three IT executives share advice for crafting visionary strategic plans.

Strategic planning - love it or hate it - is part of your job. Once a year, or maybe as often as every quarter, you are called to predict the future and think big. Do this well, and you will increase your company's competitive advantage, bringing yourself and your team the accolades (and budgets) you deserve.

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Strategic planning - love it or hate it - is part of your job. Once a year, or maybe as often as every quarter, you are called to predict the future and think big. Do this well, and you will increase your company's competitive advantage, bringing yourself and your team the accolades (and budgets) you deserve.

That, of course, is easier said than done. You know the basics - making sure your plan relates to business objectives; keeping your technology picks within justifiable budgets; periodically assessing the validity of your plan against current business conditions. But beyond these, what distinguishes truly exceptional IT strategic planners from the rest?

"A great strategic planner needs to be a bit of a visionary, in terms of understanding what's possible - then have a good business aptitude to translate that into what can accrue a desired business outcome," says Bob Rapp, who as CIO is the chief IT strategist for low-cost air carrier Frontier Airlines, in Denver.

For instance, when Frontier established an aggressive business objective of increasing online bookings, Rapp knew moving to an open, scalable Web architecture would help pave the way. A more usable, flexible and scalable site would assist the airline in nudging online bookings from 30% of revenue today to 50% by next year and ultimately to 60%, he says. With that in mind, Rapp chose Sun's Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, the Solaris 10 operating system and Opteron-based Sun Fire servers, and began rolling out advanced functionality on the site.