Rorie Devine, information systems director at rapidly growing online betting exchange Betfair, talks to Computing Business about how he shapes his firm’s IT strategy and, more importantly, keeps it alive. 

What is an IT strategy? 

It is the bit between a vision and a plan. A strategy is a little bit more grounded in real world issues than a plan. A plan is what you do. A strategy should say what you want to do, and why – an important bit that is often missed out of strategies – but it should not be concerned about the how. 

How did you build your IT strategy? 

I approach IT strategy in phases. The first was towards the end of last year where I started to think about the 2006 strategy.

We have a lot of things we want to achieve this year, so I iterated some ideas around my peers at the executive level and the people above me. At this stage we were talking broad ideas to ensure any concepts were supportive of the business strategy – a subset of the business strategy. It’s not something that exists in isolation, otherwise you run a risk of inconsistency.

I discussed this draft strategy with my team before Christmas. We had a brainstorm, we all wrote down ideas, and that process went on for about a month, iterating it both ways, up and down. I think that’s another important point about strategies – they have to be communicated. There is no point having a strategy if its sits in a Word document and nobody sees it, or the executives in the business do not see it, or even more importantly the people in your team do not see it. Once I had these ideas, I documented them and I wrote a short presentation. I find the mind map is a very useful way of communicating a strategy: you can put a lot of information on one page. I have four layers of details of how we’re going to achieve the things we need to do to increase revenue and deliver global expansion. 

Have you felt it relevant or useful to seek external advice? Did you work with any analysts or consultants to develop your strategy?

It is something that I do. I do have a relationship with an analyst firm, which I ask questions. I think part of your role as a technology leader is to own a strategy. Whether you write it or not, you have to own it. You have to make it happen. It is one of the key resources for doing your job. 

And what is the next step?

Now we move from the strategy to the plan. I have regular meetings with our chief executive and, obviously, I sent him the strategy when it was finalised, asked for feedback, and we had discussions about it.

But it is also part of my job to go away and implement the plan. I raise queries with him if I think that something major has changed or I am having difficulties in achieving what we agreed.

A lot of leaders are sucked into the tactical and reactive way of working. You need to step back and ask, ‘Why are we here? What are we trying to achieve?’ It’s a really good discipline.