At StartSmart, we help leaders build an IT organization that supports the business with clarity, speed, and measurable return. Our IT Strategy Consulting service uses a practical, quantitative approach — built on IT Value Mapping — to align investments with business priorities, eliminate waste, and guide technology decisions that create lasting value.
Most organizations lose nearly half of their potential IT ROI through misalignment, under-coverage of critical processes, and poor asset productivity. We help you fix that with a structured, transparent, and actionable strategy.
What We Do
We partner with your leadership team to design an IT strategy that:
- Clarifies how technology supports your business model and competitive position
- Aligns budgets, projects, and capabilities to the priorities that matter most
- Identifies where value is lost and where targeted investment will pay off
- Creates a roadmap you can execute with confidence
- Establishes the governance, metrics, and decision logic needed for sustained results
Our goal is simple: help you build an IT capability that consistently delivers business value — not surprises, not overruns, and not shelfware.
Our Differentiator: IT Value Mapping
Unlike generic strategy frameworks, IT Value Mapping gives you a quantitative and visual way to see exactly where IT creates value — and where it does not.
It maps your business footprint (how you compete) to your IT footprint (how your technology, processes, and capabilities actually support that competition). When the two don’t match, value is lost — often 10% or more of IT spend.
With IT Value Mapping, you can:
- Detect misalignment instantly
- Drill down to the root cause (application, process, infrastructure, staffing)
- Make investment decisions with evidence instead of intuition
- Track value realization over time and adjust the roadmap as conditions change
This method has been used to guide decisions in budgeting, portfolio rationalization, enterprise architecture planning, ERP selection, outsourcing, and workforce planning.
How We Work With You
1. Understand the Business
We begin by modeling your competitive position, strategic objectives, and the processes that drive value.
2. Map IT Capability to Business Needs
We evaluate how well your systems, applications, infrastructure, data, and organization support the business footprint.
3. Quantify Gaps and Lost Value
Using IT Value Mapping, we identify misalignment, under-coverage, and areas where assets are not delivering their expected return.
4. Build a Practical IT Strategy and Roadmap
We translate insights into a clear set of priorities, investment decisions, sequencing, and expected outcomes.
5. Establish Governance, Metrics, and Controls
We help you create decision models, performance measures, and review rhythms that keep IT aligned as the business evolves.
6. Support Execution (as needed)
We stay involved to guide architecture choices, evaluate investments, or support transformation workstreams.
What You Get
A complete, real-world IT strategy that includes:
- Business–IT alignment model showing where value is created or lost
- IT capability and process coverage assessment
- Application, infrastructure, and staffing insights tied to value gaps
- Investment portfolio recommendations (stop, start, change)
- Roadmap with sequencing and expected returns
- Governance model for decision rights, prioritization, and monitoring
- Metrics and dashboards for tracking value realization
Every deliverable is designed to be understood, defended, and used immediately.
Why Leaders Choose StartSmart
- Quantitative, transparent method — no black boxes
- Immediate insight into IT spending and ROI
- Clear logic for portfolio, architecture, and sourcing decisions
- Stronger alignment between IT and business leadership
- Faster time to clarity — teams understand the strategy within a single workshop
- Proven impact — clients consistently uncover 10%+ savings on misaligned spend while increasing returns on strategic investments
Two Engagement Options
1. Full-Service Consulting
We conduct the assessment, facilitate workshops, develop the strategy, and guide implementation.
2. Enablement & Training
For organizations that prefer to build internal capability, we offer:
- Training in IT Value Mapping
- Hands-on working sessions
- Expert support as you create your own strategy and roadmap
Both models give you a repeatable way to align technology with business priorities.
Supporting Tools and Perspectives
To help your team go deeper, we provide access to:
- IT Value Mapping perspective paper – the underlying logic that powers our approach
- IT Strategic Planning template – structure your planning documents
- IT Strategy courses – strengthen internal capability
- IT Strategy 101 Course: Learn the basics of IT Strategy
- IT Strategy Course: Learn to do develop IT Strategy
These resources help you maintain strategic clarity long after the engagement ends.
Let’s Build an IT Strategy That Works
If you’re ready for an IT organization that consistently delivers value — not cost overruns or projects with unclear outcomes — we’d love to talk.
Start the conversation