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Build a Durable Goods Manufacturing Business-Aligned IT Strategy

Success depends on IT initiatives clearly aligned to business goals, IT excellence, and driving technology innovation.

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There are many issues that are complicating the industry:

  • Industry 4.0 is a technology platform that requires planning and investment in new technology and new skills.
  • Attracting and retaining talent is more difficult due to the specialized skills necessary for new technology and holding back skilled staff for support of existing technology. 
  • Harmonization of IT and OT departments is critical for smooth adoption and maximized ROI of Industry 4.0.

Our Advice

Critical Insight


  • A CIO has three roles: enable business productivity, run an effective IT shop, and drive technology innovation. Your key initiative plan must reflect these three mandates and how IT strives to fulfill them.
  • Don’t project your vision three to five years into the future. Dive deep into next year’s big-ticket items instead.
  • Developing an IT strategy is a wasted effort if no mechanisms are put in place to govern the journey.
  • If you don’t communicate it, it doesn’t exist; simple, appealing, and inspirational communication is needed.

Impact and Result

  • Establish the scope of your IT strategy by defining IT’s mission and vision statements and guiding principles.
  • Perform a retrospective of IT’s performance to recognize the current state while highlighting important strategic elements to address going forward.
  • Elicit the business context and identify strategic initiatives that are most important to the organization while building a plan to execute on it.
  • Evaluate the foundational elements of IT’s operational strategy that will be required to successfully execute on key initiatives.
  • Wrap all strategic information into a highly visual and compelling presentation that enables easy customization and executive-facing content.

Build a Durable Goods Manufacturing Business-Aligned IT Strategy Research & Tools

1. Build a Durable Goods Manufacturing Business-Aligned IT Strategy Storyboard – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to properly align with the business, achieve IT excellence, and drive technology innovation.

Align with the business by creating an IT strategy that documents the business context, key initiatives, and a strategic roadmap. To create a business-aligned IT strategy, you must understand what the business does and what the business will need. Only then can a carefully thought-out, strategic and tactical plan be created.

This storyboard will help you build your IT mission and vision statements and IT guiding principles, elicit business context from the CIO and the IT team, identify your key initiatives and build their profiles, construct your strategic roadmap, and evaluate your governance structures, budget, and organizational changes.

Build a Durable Goods Manufacturing Business-Aligned IT Strategy – Phases 1-4

2. Business Context Interview Guide – An interview guide to help you elicit the business context by interviewing business leaders and peers

Use this template as a starting point to interview your business leaders to elicit the business context. The goal of the interviews is to extract business goals, organizational priorities, and business initiatives that will play a critical role in building your IT strategy. Meet with your executive team and work with them to identify essential knowledge.

Business Context Interview Guide

3. IT Strategy Presentation Template – A best-of-breed template to help you build a clear, concise, and compelling strategy document for stakeholders.

This presentation template uses sample data from "Acme Corp" to demonstrate an ideal IT strategy. Use this template to document your final strategy outputs including executive-facing business alignment and strategy highlights, key initiatives and summaries, strategic roadmap, budget proposal, IT goals and operating model, functional project roadmaps, and year-in-review data to highlight IT success stories.

IT Strategy Presentation Template

4. IT Strategy Workbook – A structured tool to help you prioritize IT strategy activities and build a roadmap to ensure success.

This tool guides an IT department in planning and prioritization activities to build an effective IT strategy. This Excel workbook guides you through making key decisions regarding the visuals that should be incorporated into your final presentation document. Key activities include building a goals cascade visual that shows the relationships between business and IT goals, initiatives, and capabilities; prioritizing key initiatives using a balanced scorecard approach; and building the IT strategy roadmap using a Gantt chart visual to showcase project execution timelines.

IT Strategy Workbook
Unlock a Free Sample

Build a Durable Goods Manufacturing Business-Aligned IT Strategy

Success depends on IT initiatives clearly aligned to business goals, IT excellence, and driving technology innovation.

Executive Summary

IT strategies are often nonexistent or ineffective.

  • According to the Management and Governance Diagnostic (MGD), 74.6% of organizations have an IT strategy process they feel is ineffective.1
  • IT does not do a good job of communicating its support for business goals; therefore, 23.6% of CXOs still feel that their goals are unsupported by IT.2

    • IT departments that have not developed IT strategies experience issues with alignment, organization, and prioritization.

Three-quarters of surveyed CEOs value tech leaders with experience fostering operational stability and strategic business alignment,3 however…

  • The CIO is seen as an order taker by business executives. This usually results in the demands on IT far outstripping the IT budget.
  • Projects and initiatives are not prioritized around business objectives. Synergies and dependencies are recognized too late. Projects are often late or put on hold because of sudden changes to business requirements.

Follow Info-Tech’s approach to developing a strong IT strategy.

  • Use Info-Tech’s industry-focused approach to discern the business context.
  • Clearly communicate to business executives how IT will support the organization’s key objectives and initiatives using the Strategy Presentation Template.
  • Use Info-Tech’s Prioritization Tool to help make project decisions in a holistic manner that allows for the selection of the most-valuable initiatives to become part of the IT strategic roadmap.

Info-Tech Insight

A CIO has three roles: enable business productivity, run an effective IT shop, and drive technology innovation. Your IT strategy must reflect these three mandates and how IT strives to fulfill them.

1: Info-Tech, Management and Governance Diagnostic; n=1,931
2: Info-Tech, CEO-CIO Alignment Diagnostic; n=863
3: CIO Journal, 2020

Executive Summary: Durable Goods Manufacturing Business-Aligned IT Strategy

Situation: Competitive landscape transformation

The durable goods manufacturing environment is changing significantly. With new Industry 4.0 technology, a rapidly growing consumer class, changes in demographics, a push for operational efficiency, and a more highly regulated space, the competitive landscape has become complex. The need to innovate and digitally transform operations is increasing.

IT organizations must play a critical role in the business transformation by harmonizing the interconnectivity and communications necessary for rapid and effective change.

Complication: Lack of skills and collaboration

There are many issues that are complicating the industry:

  • Industry 4.0 is a technology platform that requires planning and investment in new technology and new skills.
  • Attracting and retaining talent is more difficult due to the specialized skills necessary for new technology and holding back skilled staff for the support of existing technology.
  • Harmonization of IT and OT departments is critical for smooth adoption and maximized ROI of Industry 4.0.

Solution: A business-aligned approach

By engaging in the insights and activities presented in this research, you will:

  • Learn about the fundamentals of your industry including its ecosystem, influences, opportunities, and constraints.
  • Conduct SWOT analyses within the context of your industry, with guiding insights from Info-Tech, to understand unique implications for IT.
  • Devise a list of initiatives you can integrate into your IT strategic plan to transform the role IT plays in your organization.

The durable goods manufacturing industry

Making things that last:

  • Typically takes longer than for non-durable items
  • Creates goods that are expected to last more than three years
  • Involves both a complex production process and a complex supply chain process
  • Means higher exposure to obsolescence
  • Typically more expensive to produce
  • Requires heavy up-front capital investment
  • Results in higher-end product purchase value
  • Sees customer purchases based on rational decisions rather than on emotional factors
  • Means selling the product might involve financial tools (leasing, loans, etc.)
  • Has a longer lead time
  • Has strong planning capabilities requirements

The durable goods IT environment

  • Technological innovation
  • Environmental stewardship
  • Disposable income
  • Economic outlook
  • Trade agreements
  • Capital investment

Influencing factors

  • Technological innovation: Technology and innovation are creating opportunities for the durable goods manufacturing space. They have the potential to transform and disrupt the market. Industry 4.0 technologies such as additive manufacturing and AR/VR are creating new markets and lowering the entry barriers for some smaller manufacturers.
  • Environmental stewardship: Beyond sustainable manufacturing, which pursues economically and environmentally friendly processes, environmental stewardship is a holistic approach that leads and promotes the use of cost-efficient, safe, and ecologically friendly processes.
  • Disposable income: An increase in disposable income for the middle-class demographic directly impacts this sector as business ramps up after COVID-19.
  • Economic outlook: Economic outcomes influence this industry at a higher degree given the higher price and lifespan expectations of the products made.
  • Trade agreements: Global protectionism and trade disputes have reshaped the landscape; offshoring has been reduced and onshoring has grown.
  • Capital investment: Businesses need to be more creative in order to deal with the large capital investments needed for sustainable manufacturing processes. Affordable and sustainable credit in developed countries offers them a distinct competitive advantage.

Durable goods industry facts

  • Contribution to GDP
  • Small manufacturers
  • Strong worldwide growth
  • Unfilled positions
  • Top in innovation funding

The hard numbers

  • Contribution to GDP: Manufacturing is one of the biggest contributors to the US GDP. In fact, for every $1 spent in manufacturing, another $2.79 is added to the economy.
  • Small manufacturers: Most manufacturers in the US are small. A 2017 survey identified 248,030 manufacturers; all but 3,914 were small (fewer than 500 employees).
  • Strong worldwide growth: Over the past 19 years, worldwide manufacturing has multiplied 2.67 times, from US$4.8 trillion to US$12.75 trillion.
  • Unfilled positions: Manufacturing is projected to need 4 million jobs filled by 2030, with 2.1 million expected to go unfilled as workers attempt to pursue other, more modern career paths.
  • Top in innovation funding: Although it is difficult to retain people, the manufacturing sector performs nearly 62% of all private sector R&D at approximately US$293.6 billion in 2019 and should be leveraged to compel workers to stay within the sector as it continues to grow.

(Source: National Association of Manufacturers)

Durable goods competitive landscape

  • Digital transformation
  • Digital workforce
  • Contactless interaction
  • New competitors

Transformation of durable goods

  • Digital transformation: Increased dependency on digital infrastructure will create a migration and sustainability challenge for the IT organization.

    Legacy migration needs to be addressed as part of the digital transformation strategy, which must be timely due to the inherent cybersecurity risks associated with legacy equipment and software.
  • Digital workforce: New conditions are generated by Industry 4.0 and an expanded remote workforce, as well as accelerated use of IoT, AI, blockchain, and cobotics that are driving the need for rapid change. New training programs must be put in place to upskill and reskill staff with a focus on technology, process, and effective communications.
  • Contactless interaction: COVID-19 created many instant changes for business, and changes such as contactless processes will be retained as workers wish to remain safe from new variants.
  • New competitors: Some technologies will bring new competitors as the entry barriers are lowered or removed altogether for certain sectors within the industry.

Critical challenges in durable goods IT

  • Legacy
  • New technology in a traditional culture
  • New competition
  • Adjusting the business model

Catching up with rapid transformation

  • Legacy: Legacy systems are an essential part of the current operations for many manufacturing businesses and cannot easily be replaced by some of the newer technologies. They become more costly to service as providers, skills, and parts are in short supply.
  • New tech in a traditional culture: The introduction of new technology will generate the need for:
    • Overcoming a weak digital culture, which will create an obstacle for new technology adoption and proliferation in the organization.
    • A skills-level review of the organization’s workforce and development of retraining programs.
    • The need to leverage new technology in an agile way, as big bang replacement isn’t practical from a skills and cost perspective.
    • Avoiding disruption of the 100% uptime business model.
    • Balancing innovation and operational lights-on support with standardization.
  • New competition: Globalization means new competitors.
  • Adjusting the business model: Products will need to be converted to a subscription-based operating model in order to keep pace with industry-wide business model changes.

Critical opportunities in durable goods IT

  • Expanded horizons
  • Faster design-to-market cycle
  • New Industry 4.0 technologies
  • More customization
  • Takeover business opportunities

New tech and new markets

  • Expanded horizons: New markets, new partnerships with customers, and converting products to services will expand business opportunities as well as more predictable revenue streams.
  • Faster design-to-market cycle: Accelerated design and testing processes will bring products and services to market faster, with improved quality.
  • New Industry 4.0 technologies: Augmented reality, AI, blockchain, and digital twin technologies are examples of technology that can be leveraged for increased ROI in the business.
  • More customization: Higher degrees of customization and flexibility will be enabled by new visual codeless technologies. Traditionally expensive customization can now take place at a much lower cost and an extremely rapid pace.
  • Takeover business opportunities: Legislative changes create complications for the business while also creating opportunities for takeover business as some businesses exit legacy markets for emerging markets. The automotive sector is a good example of where emissions standards cause some businesses to exit or pivot away from the gasoline engine market.

Info-Tech’s approach

  1. Establish the Scope of Your IT Strategy

    Establish the scope of your IT strategy by defining IT’s mission and vision statements and guiding principles.

  2. Review IT Performance From Last Fiscal Year

    A retrospective of IT’s performance helps recognize the current state while highlighting important strategic elements to address going forward.

  3. Build Your Key Initiative Plan

    Elicit the business context and identify strategic initiatives that are most important to the organization and build a plan to execute on them.

  4. Define IT’s Operational Strategy

    Evaluate the foundational elements of IT’s operational strategy that will be required to successfully execute on key initiatives.

Info-Tech’s methodology for IT strategy

01: Business Context

02: Key Initiative Plan

03: Operational Strategy

04: Executive Presentation

Inputs
  • Business Strategy
  • Industry Capability Map
  • Business Context Information
  • Diagnostic Reports to Assess Current State
  • Last Fiscal Strategy
  • Key Initiatives List
  • Last Fiscal Operational Strategy
  • Initiatives & Roadmap
  • Operational Strategy

Outputs

Business Context Information for Step 2:

  • Business goals
  • Organizational objectives & initiatives
  • Industry customized capability map

IT Strategy Information for Approval:

  • Strategy scope
  • Year in review
  • Key initiative plan & profiles
  • Goals cascade
  • Roadmap

Operational Strategy Information for Step 4:

  • Stakeholder management
  • Metrics & targets
  • Risk management
  • Organizational changes
  • Budget
  • Functional roadmap & next steps

Executive Presentations for:

  • Business executives
  • IT team
  • Board
  • Org-wide key highlights

Service

 Pre-Workshop
Industry-Specific
Guided Implementation 		IT Strategy Workshop IT Strategy Workshop IT Strategy Workshop

Info-Tech’s methodology for IT strategy

Light-weight assessments and Thorough Analysis steps for each stage of Info-Tech’s methodology or IT strategy.

Blueprint deliverables

The IT Strategy Workbook supports each step of this blueprint to help you accomplish your goals:

Goals Cascade Visual

Elicit business context and use the workbook to build your custom goals cascade.

Initiative Prioritization

Use the weighted scorecard approach to evaluate and prioritize your strategic initiatives.

Roadmap/ Gantt Chart

Populate your Gantt chart to visually represent your key initiative plan over the next 12 months.

Key deliverable:

IT Strategy Presentation Template

A highly visual and compelling presentation template that enables easy customization and executive-facing content.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful"

Guided Implementation

"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would be helpful."

Workshop

"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

Phase 0

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Phase 4
  • Call #1: Discuss business context and customize your organization’s capability map.
  • Call #2: Identify mission and vision statements and guiding principles to discuss strategy scope.
  • Call #3: Assess year-in-review data and evaluate performance.
  • Call #4: Discuss diagnostic data results and success stories.
  • Call #5: Identify strategic initiatives and required information.
  • Call #6: Discuss how to build your roadmap.
  • Call #7: Discuss and identify appropriate operational strategy components.
  • Call #8: Summarize results and plan next steps.

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is between 8 to 12 calls over the course of 2 to 4 months.

Workshop Agenda

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Session 0
(Pre-Workshop)

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3

Session 4

Session 5
(Post-Workshop)

Activities

Elicit Business Context

0.1 Complete recommended diagnostic programs.

0.2 Interview key business stakeholders, as needed, to identify business context: business goals, initiatives, and the organization’s mission and vision.

0.3 (Optional) CIO to compile and prioritize IT success stories.

Establish the Scope of Your IT Strategy

1.1 Review/validate the business context.

1.2 Construct your mission and vision statements.

1.3 Elicit your guiding principles and finalize IT strategy scope.

Build Your Key Initiative Plan

2.1 Identify key IT initiatives that support the business.

2.2 Identify key IT initiatives that enable operational excellence.

2.3 Identify key IT initiatives that drive technology innovation.

2.4 Consolidate and prioritize (where needed) your IT initiatives.

Build Your Key Initiative Plan (cont.)

3.1 Determine IT goals.

3.2 Complete goals cascade.

3.3 Build your IT strategy roadmap.

Define Your Operational Strategy

4.1 Identify metrics and targets per IT goal.

4.2 (Optional) Identify required skills and resource capacity.

4.3 Discuss next steps and wrap-up.

Document Strategy

5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables.

5.2 (Optional) Set up review time for workshop deliverable.

Outcomes
  1. Diagnostics reports (CIO Business Vision, Management and Governance Diagnostic, CEO-CIO alignment)
  2. IT Strategy Workbook – Business Context
  1. IT strategy scope (IT mission, vision, and guiding principles)
  1. List of key IT initiatives
  1. Goals cascade
  2. Roadmap (Gantt chart)
  1. IT metrics and targets
  2. IT resourcing changes
  3. Next steps and strategy refresh schedule
  1. IT strategy presentation
Build a Durable Goods Manufacturing Business-Aligned IT Strategy preview picture

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

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Guided Implementation 1: Customize Your Capability Map
  • Call 1: Discuss business context and customize your organization’s capability map.

Guided Implementation 2: Establish the Scope of Your IT Strategy.
  • Call 1: Identify mission and vision statements and guiding principles to discuss strategy scope.

Guided Implementation 3: Review Performance From Last Fiscal Year
  • Call 1: Assess year-in-review data and evaluate performance.
  • Call 2: Discuss diagnostic data results and success stories.

Guided Implementation 4: Build Your Key Initiative Plan
  • Call 1: Identify strategic initiatives and required information.
  • Call 2: Discuss how to build your roadmap.

Guided Implementation 5: Define Your Operational Strategy
  • Call 1: Discuss and identify appropriate operational strategy components.
  • Call 2: Summarize results and plan next steps.

Authors

Kevin Tucker

Sanchia Benedict

Gord Harrison

Jack Hakimian

Contributors

  • Luis Ramón Ramos Espinoza, Chief Information Officer, Suramericana
  • Kyle Saverance, Chief Information Officer, Coker College
  • Scott Ross, SVP Omni-Channel Technologies, Lowe’s Companies
  • Max Min, Director, Waterloo City Centre
  • Philip D’Aurelio, Development Solutions Supervisor, City of Hamilton
  • Michael Dieckmann, Chief Operating Officer, Florida Virtual Campus
  • Joe Evers, Consulting Principal, JcEvers Consulting Corporation
  • Ken Piddington, Chief Information Officer, MRE Consulting
  • 2 anonymous contributors
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