IT Strategy Examples and Templates: A Quick Guide

Introduction to IT Strategic Planning

IT strategic planning is the process of defining how technology will support and shape your business over the next several years. 

It helps you shift from reacting to urgent requests, like patching legacy systems or adding tools on the fly, to mapping out where IT needs to invest, modernize, or scale. 

In other words, IT strategic planning is akin to building a roadmap for future infrastructure upgrades, security improvements, cloud adoption, application rationalization, and more future infrastructure upgrades, security improvements, cloud adoption, application rationalization, and more.

It also involves weighing trade-offs, planned budget allocations, and building systems to respond to change.

This kind of planning helps you answer tough questions, such as:

• Where should we allocate time, money, and talent for the highest impact?
• How can we mitigate risks associated with outdated systems or emerging cyber threats?
• What do we need to stay relevant as customer and market expectations grow?

Here's how a Redditor explains IT strategic planning

Via Reddit

But what makes IT Strategic planning so effective? Let’s find out.

Read More: How HighLevel Saves $1.4M per year in IT Hardware Management

Key Components of an Effective IT Strategic Plan

A strong IT strategic plan isn’t created in a vacuum. It’s the product of collaboration between your business and technical leadership. 

Here are some essential components of such a plan:

• Business-led Objectives: Your company’s goals, like growth or efficiency that set the direction for the IT strategy and keep it grounded.
• Current State Assessment: A clear look at your existing tech, teams, and workflows reveal what you're working with and where the gaps lie.
• Future State Architecture: A vision of where you want your IT to be in a few years, shaped by business needs and tech trends.
• Execution and Governance: The plan for making it all happen—who does what, when, and how progress is tracked.

Workwize, an IT hardware lifecycle management platform, helps you plan your IT strategy more effectively.

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Get hardware delivered to and picked up anywhere around the world in just 5-7 business days, with ordering made easy through a centralized portal.

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Step-by-Step Guide to Developing an IT Framework

Enterprises with high-performing IT teams report up to 35% higher revenue growth and 10% higher profit margins. All that’s made possible with powerful IT strategic planning and frameworks.

The steps below help you go from strategy to measurable value.

Step 1: Start with business priorities

The process begins with leadership conversations, not with requests like “we need a new CRM,” but with the bigger picture behind those asks.

To begin, you must study:

• Growth targets (like entering new markets, scaling operations)
• Cost pressures or profitability goals
• Operational bottlenecks affecting customer experience
• Regulatory or security-driven initiatives

Without clarity on the basics and leadership’s buy-in, IT plans will drift or stall at some point.

Read More: Cybersecurity Audit Checklist for Remote Work [2025 Updated]

Step 2: Take a hard look at the current state

With your business context in place, it’s time to look inward. Audit your infrastructure, applications, processes, and skill sets, but don’t stop at technical inventories. 

Audit across five core areas:

• Infrastructure and platforms: Age, cost, and performance of hardware, cloud services, and networks
• Applications and tools: Redundancies, underused licenses, or high-maintenance systems
• Team skills and structure: Where you have depth, where you're stretched thin
• Processes and delivery models: Are you following ITIL, Agile, DevOps, and are they working?
• Costs and value delivery: Identify where spending is misaligned with outcomes

Talk to internal users. Capture what slows them down. This phase should reveal not only technical gaps but also workflow and support issues that might block future progress.

Step 3: Define your future-state architecture

This is your target model: the IT environment you’re working toward over the next few years.

It includes

• Technical direction: Define whether your organization will implement zero-trust security, move toward an API-led integration strategy, or something else entirely.
• Principles for decision-making: Define non-negotiables like modularity, scalability, or user-centered design
• Operating model evolution: Will you move to platform teams, shared services, or product-centric delivery?

This sets standards for how future decisions are made.

Step 4: Build a roadmap that’s actually executable

Now, turn your future-state vision into a phased, executable plan. Rank projects by business impact, urgency, and dependencies to clarify what moves first and what can wait.

Lay out initiatives over your set timeline with phases that reflect your team’s real capacity and risk tolerance. Estimate the budget, staffing, skills, and external support needed at each stage.

Try to include a few quick wins, with low-risk, high-value projects. These build momentum and maintain strong leadership support.

Step 5: Sell the plan and make it stick

Once the framework is complete, present it to the executive team as a business strategy, not a tech investment pitch. 

Show how it directly ties to business outcomes and long-term value. Once it’s approved, activate the governance model: set up a steering committee, lock in review cadences, and treat the roadmap as a living document that gets updated as we proceed.

Using Templates the Right Way

IT strategy templates provide pre-built frameworks with sections such as provide pre-built frameworks with sections such as infrastructure planning, risk management, and resource allocation. They structure your thinking and prevent you from missing critical areas.

However, templates are only helpful if you're clear on what they're not. They're not a strategy, and they won't do the hard thinking for you. They give you a head start and help avoid obvious omissions.

To help you get started, we've included two templates—one for teams building a strategy from scratch, and another for those updating or reshaping an existing framework.

Please Note: These are simplified verification checklists. They are designed to help a business leader confirm that the right strategic conversations are taking place and that the plan is aligned with business reality. The detailed work behind each item must be done by the IT and business teams.

Template 1: Checklist for a New IT Strategy

Use this to make sure your first formal IT strategy is built on a solid foundation.

Phase 1: Is the plan tied to the business?

Have we clearly listed the top 3-5 company goals this IT plan must support (example: "Increase customer retention by 15%")?

Can we draw a straight line from each major IT initiative to one of those business goals?

Have the key business leaders reviewed and agreed on these priorities?

Phase 2: Where Do We Stand?

Do we have a clear list of our biggest technology risks?

Do we know where the IT budget is currently being spent and what value we are getting from it?

Do we have the right people and skills on the team to actually achieve this plan?

Phase 3: Is there a clear path forward?

Do we have a simple, multi-year roadmap that shows what gets done first, what waits, and why?

Is there a clear, high-level budget allocated for the plan's major projects?

Have we defined 3-5 simple, non-technical metrics to measure if this strategy is working?
Do we know who is ultimately accountable for the success of this plan and how often we will review progress?

Template 2: Checklist for Refreshing an Existing IT Strategy

Use this to quickly check and update your current IT plan.

Phase 1: How did our last plan do?

Did the previous IT plan deliver the business results we expected? (Yes/No/Partially)

Did we get a good return on our major tech investments, and did we stay on budget?

Do we have a clear understanding of what worked, what didn't, and why?

Phase 2: What has changed?

Have our company's main goals or market conditions changed significantly since the last plan was made?

Are there new competitive threats or security risks that our current plan doesn't address?

Is our current technology approach still competitive, or are we falling behind?

Phase 3: Is our new plan ready?

Have we formally re-prioritized our list of IT projects to focus on what matters most today?

Is it clear to everyone which projects are being stopped, started, or continued?

Have we adjusted the budget and staffing to support the updated priorities?

Has the updated plan been approved and communicated to all key business leaders?

Real-world IT Strategy Examples

The right IT strategy can lead to faster decisions, fewer failures, or entirely new revenue models for your business, especially in B2B, where technology is closely lead to faster decisions, fewer failures, or entirely new revenue models for your business, especially in B2B, where technology is closely tied to physical assets, logistics, and operations.

Here are three examples that show what real strategy change looks like:

1. Netflix

Facing a critical capacity crunch in 2008, Netflix moved entirely to AWS and abandoned traditional data centers.

Netflix built a virtual studio in the AWS cloud, enabling engagement with artistic talent anywhere in the world without barriers. Their architecture strategy focused on three principles:

• Multi-region deployment across four AWS regions with intelligent traffic steering
• Auto-scaling compute groups that handle sudden load spikes while maintaining cost efficiency
• Cloud-based workstations using AWS Local Zones (enabling single-digit millisecond latency)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, their cloud-first strategy enabled easy content production when their team completed over 600 VFX shots for "The Crown" season 4 entirely remotely.

2. Spotify

Spotify's IT strategy involves utilizing data and machine learning to deliver personalized experiences to millions of users.

It involved a scalable setup that included:

• Event-driven architecture: Handling 100B+ daily events to track user behavior
• ML platform standardization: Letting teams deploy models to production in hours
• Experimentation infrastructure: Powering thousands of A/B tests at once

This has enabled Spotify to process petabytes of data daily, powering its recommendation engines and allowing features such as Discover Weekly and Daily Mixes.

3. Twilio

Before Twilio, adding SMS or voice to an app meant wrestling with telecom protocols and vendor complexity. Twilio's answer was a clean set of APIs that let developers embed global communication features in minutes, not months.

Platforms like Flexport use Twilio to send real-time shipment updates; thousands of B2B apps rely on it to talk to their users.

Twilio scaled from $277M in revenue (2016) to $3.83B (2022), all by selling architecture as a service.

Make IT Strategic Planning Easier With Workwize 

Ultimately, an IT strategy is a tool for creating results, not a document for the archives.

Its purpose isn't to be read once and filed away; it's to be consulted on the sidelines, adapted at halftime, and used to make winning decisions under pressure. 

Workwize, with its powerful IT hardware lifecycle management features, helps you make IT strategic planning easier with a clear view of your hardware infrastructure and planning.

Brands like HighLevel, DuckDuckGo, and Prezi trust Workwize to manage their IT.

Schedule a Workwize demo now to learn more.