That's not a strategic plan...

Strategy documents.

Did I just see you yawn? Let me try again. Strategy documents.

Setting high level goals is important, but the process walks a knife edge: are the goals too general to be realized? are they too specific to provide a guide to the whole organization?

Here’s the goals from the BC CIO’s strategic plan:

It’s hard to choose where to start hating these: the focus on process; the organization-centric worldview; or the relentless use of the passive voice. You choose.

When Vivek Kundra took over as Barack Obama’s CIO, he produced a 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management:

While there’s still a certain amount of navel-gazing at internal concerns, around things like CIO councils and review boards, the plan at least is made up of actions, stated in the active voice, most of which can be evaluated on a done/not-done basis over time. The organization can track whether it is executing this plan, and whether staff are allocated to it’s accomplishment.

Of more recent vintage, the UK Government Digital Service has a strategic plan (note, available in simple HTML):

There are fewer done/not done items here than in the US plan, but a lot less emphasis on internal processes and more about achieving results, for “people” (the word “people” shows up in four of the twelve points). The plan is focussed on not on internal processes, but on external results.

Which organization is likely to produce more positive results for the people who pay their salaries? The one “optimizing collaboration across the division”? Or the one that seeks to “increase the number of people who use digital services”?

This can be (heck, it IS) deathly dull, but these documents provide the base note over which the activities of an organization are laid: does this organization accomplish things, or does it talk about how best to accomplish things? You can tell a lot, and learn a lot, from these documents.