Business and Information Planning (BIP) can deliver significant benefits for your business. It is an effective tool for monitoring whether your strategy and objectives are delivering the desired results. It gives you a clear understanding of which activities add value and which do not. This helps you decide which activities to optimise and which to discontinue. In this article, we explore the impact of BIP in more detail, illustrated by a practical example from our work with Stichting CIS.

Does your business need to innovate and expand its services? Or do you need to modernise the technology behind existing products? This could involve creating a flexible architecture that is easy to maintain, keeping up with the latest security requirements or managing the lifecycle of the products you use. The available budget plays an important role in these decisions. In most cases, it is limited, so priorities must be set. How do you make the right choices and ensure your organisation or department is working on the right innovations at the right time? Business and Information Planning (BIP) can help.

• BIP provides a concise, shareable description of activities and priorities. You can use this to explain their priority and interdependencies to all stakeholders.
• Starting from your organisation’s strategy and objectives prevents time being wasted on activities that contribute less to those objectives.
• All activities, including more technical ones, are linked to the strategy. This allows you to prioritise them against one another. You can explain to all stakeholders why an activity is necessary, even when it involves less visible work, such as replacing technical components.
• Everyone working on changes each day follows the same strategy and guiding principles.
• BIP helps you avoid being driven by day-to-day pressures. It gives you a sound basis for assessing the impact of new developments. New developments challenge the objectives set out in BIP, prompting adjustments where necessary. In turn, new developments are assessed on how they contribute to achieving those objectives.

The collaboration between CIS and AMIS encompasses many goals and ambitions. Our consultants worked with CIS decision makers and domain specialists on Business and Information Planning (BIP). CIS’s ambitions were translated into a roadmap – outlining the changes needed to achieve the desired objectives. Through interviews and a review of available documentation, including growth plans and annual reports, we gained a clear understanding of CIS’s previous strategies. This helped identify potential bottlenecks and anticipate challenges. Together, both parties developed a strategy setting out the objectives and activities needed to achieve the desired results and fulfil CIS’s ambitions.

In the BIP, we outlined the activities for the next three years. We are convinced that a new BIP will be needed after three years because the world is changing rapidly.

The outcome of the BIP for CIS is a visually appealing document that maps out the guiding principles, the current situation and the desired changes. These are structured around the four BIP themes: ‘Customers and services’, ‘Processes and organisation’, ‘Information’ and ‘IT infrastructure & applications’. The highest priority actions are identified for each theme. We started working on these actions immediately.

Decisions will still need to be made over time. The BIP helps us make the right choices. By taking CIS’s strategy and objectives as our starting point, we avoid spending time on activities that contribute less to those objectives. The BIP clearly sets out the direction CIS needs to take to remain competitive with other organisations in its field in the future.

Each quarter, we decide what we will actually work on in the period ahead. We assess new developments and opportunities against the objectives and activities set out in the BIP. We make deliberate choices about what to do and what to leave aside. New developments may be urgent, but are they urgent enough to put other work on hold? There must be a good reason to deviate from the activities and priorities in the BIP. The BIP also provides a framework for communicating progress to the CIS board and participants.

Would you like to experience the benefits of BIP for your organisation or department? We can help you develop a BIP, giving you a powerful tool to monitor your strategies and objectives and identify the most relevant activities to achieve your goals and ambitions. We focus on the processes, products and services that make your business unique.