The technology that Indian sells to their customers is the same technology that we use to run the organization.

A few years ago, a lot of organizations viewed IT as a necessary evil. We were lumped together with human resources and a number of other support functions as something you just had to do, and do as cheaply as possible. The view nowadays is that IT is much more core to business strategy, and that’s especially true for technology firms such as ourselves.

From discussions with his peers, Hitchcock found that IT is also becoming core in an increasing number of non-technology firms.

So how does Hitchcock go about developing an IT strategy?

We have a well-defined process for developing our strategy. The cornerstone of it is an 18- to 24-month strategy that we revisit every 12 months. I have a chief architect - a combination of a strategy person and a technology person - who looks at our 24-month vision both in terms of what’s happening in the business, at a Nortel level and at a market level.

What market challenges will we be facing in the next 24 months? He takes a macro-level view of that and IT view of what’s happening with IT.

Most people would consider a strategy to be something that looks at longer-term horizons, maybe five years. Some people say that a 24-month strategy is not really a strategy but a set of objectives, says Hitchcock.

But technology is moving so fast that I don’t think you can reliably predict beyond 18 to 24 months.

When gathering data for the IT strategy, the process never stops. There isn’t a fixed starts and stops timeline, says Hitchcock.

Once the chief architect has analyzed the environment that Nortel is operating in, the team looks at the company own business objectives for the next 12 months.

We boil that down to a combination of a vision and something we can make into an operational set of objectives, says Hitchcock. We have a set of about 10 priorities that we manage, and we review those every six months. That set of priorities has to link back to the strategy. Every employee in the firm understands his or her priorities for the six-month period. They also understand how their work contributes to delivering the greater vision. The strategy really becomes a living document.