Rind joined Adecco in July 2001. Adecco NA's Switzerland-based parent (Adecco SA) was formed by the 1996 merger of Adia and Ecco, and Rind says the company's IT resources until then were consumed almost entirely by the process of knitting the two together and getting proprietary front-office software (called Custom Match) rolled out to 800 offices. "I'd like to take the credit for that, but they had already finished when I got here," he laughs. "So for the new year, I said I would like to put together a strategy plan other than just getting these two companies merged."

3 Don't Sweat the Details
(The Specifics of Execution Do Belong in Another Document)

IT strategic plans need to be written with an appropriate level of detail. The right level of detail fulfills two requirements. One is that it should allow enough wiggle room so that the IT group will be able to change implementation details without rewriting the strategic plan. The second is that the plan will be comprehensible to non-IS executives.

At Nationwide, the IT strategic plan, or "blueprint," is limited by decree to 100 pages. ("It used to be 50 pages, but then the technical guys went double-sided on me," says CIO McKinnon.) That means there isn't room to describe the entire data warehousing architecture in detail - and that's intentional, McKinnon says. Each subsection of the overall plan is broken out into subdocuments that get into the nitty-gritty. These subdocuments are not part of the official strategic plan. "If you get too detailed in a particular area, you're not going to be able to use the [strategic plan] document" to communicate to the rest of the organization, says McKinnon.

Jeff Balagna, senior vice president and CIO at medical device maker Medtronic - a $5.5 billion global company based in Minneapolis - follows a similar approach. "The strategic plan is a high-level document. It has the business imperatives, the problems we're trying to solve." That plan goes into a "summit" meeting of business unit IT leaders, who break the plan into projects with owners, teams and deadlines.