If you’re an IT leader, you’ve likely, at some point, sat in front of a blank document titled “IT Strategy” and didn’t know where to start. How do you even begin thinking about strategy for your department? You’re obviously expected to “bring value”, but what does that actually mean?

In his book IT Strategy, Jim Maholic suggests a helpful imperative to structure your approach: the SEAR imperative. He argues that there are four ways IT can contribute to the business:

  • Increase sales
  • Reduce expenses
  • Optimise assets
  • Mitigate risk

Let’s look at them in a bit more detail.

Increase Sales

This is usually where you want to focus most of your attention: bringing new revenue to the company. There are several ways IT can contribute:

  • Increase revenue from existing clients
  • Help attract new clients
  • Expand into new markets

Talk to your sales and account management teams to understand the needs of your current clients and potential leads. Look for ways to decrease time to market, deliver killer new features, improve integration speed, and raise the quality of technical support. Approach your key clients directly and interview them. It’s always best to hear their perspective first-hand.

Your marketing and business development teams can provide valuable insights into which new markets may be attractive. These are rarely arbitrary; they often involve new geographies with local requirements, different business segments (e.g. large enterprises vs. small businesses), or adjacent industries.

No matter how much effort you devote to the other three directions, you should always maintain activity here—or risk being perceived as just a “cost center”.

Reduce Expenses

With few exceptions, a company’s goal is to make profit, not just revenue. To achieve that, expenses must be controlled. For IT, this usually means:

  • Investing in automation where it clearly pays off and reduces operational costs
  • Keeping internal costs down: optimising infrastructure spend, negotiating vendor contracts, and killing or restructuring inefficient projects
  • Providing data-driven insights into operational inefficiencies to support better financial decisions

Talk to your finance and operations teams. They should help you estimate budgets and ROI for your initiatives. If you have a procurement function, involve them early—they can help find better-priced vendors or renegotiate existing contracts.

Maintain a healthy balance between cost-cutting and investment in innovation. Over-optimising for short-term savings can damage the company’s long-term growth.

Optimise Assets

Given IT’s role in automation, it is often expected to organise and optimise the company’s assets to improve overall efficiency. This usually starts with a tedious but necessary review of systems, technical assets, and data. Look for outdated systems, duplicated functionality, redundant tools, or overly complex processes. Your goal is to:

  • Standardise solutions to reduce variance and eliminate redundancy
  • Review and structure data assets to ensure critical business data is stored and used correctly
  • Simplify over-engineered business processes

This work is critical to reduce friction, maintain data consistency, and keep shadow IT under control. Otherwise, teams will work with conflicting data, develop unsafe workarounds, and waste time figuring out which system to trust. Successfully doing this will enable your company to do more with less.

Expect to collaborate closely with other departments and be prepared for resistance. Nobody enjoys being told they need to change how they work.

Mitigate Risk

The final group of activities focuses on reducing the company’s risk exposure. It’s naive to plan IT work—or the business as a whole—without explicitly considering risk. IT influences multiple risk categories, including:

  • Project schedule and budget risks
  • Compliance and security risks
  • Technology risks
  • Vendor risks
  • Operational risks
  • Market risks

Check whether your company already uses a formal risk assessment framework and reuse it where possible. Review it through the lens of your own responsibilities. Before implementing mitigation measures, align your assessment with other stakeholders: what looks critical to IT may be acceptable to another department, and vice versa.

Summary

Strategy is about making choices—about what to do and what not to do. SEAR forces you to choose. You cannot optimise everything, eliminate all risk, and grow aggressively at the same time.

Align yourself with the overall business strategy and be clear on what is expected from IT. Do your own analysis and bring forward new ideas. Decide which pillar matters most right now, invest accordingly, but don’t abandon others completely. Every initiative should map to at least one pillar; if it doesn’t, scrap it or restructure it.

SEAR alone does not constitute a complete IT strategy, but it is a solid starting point—and a useful filter to ensure you’re working in the right direction.