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A 'strategy' is a way to achieve set goals. Or to way how to go to a destination. A company should have strategic goals in order to be competitive and to survive. Those goals can be financial, market share, geographical spread, globalization, cost reduction, employee reduction etc. Once strategic goals or strategic directions are set, all other functions should work towards achieving them. IT is no exception. It should support the company activities which will ultimately have an impact on the set goals by way of process improvements, process automation, e-commerce, customer/supplier relationship management, Enterprise Resource Planning etc. As an example, a Pizza company wants to be the number one Pizza delivery in that particular country/region. Then the strategy should be to device a mechanism to get customer calls and deliver within30 minutes (assume). IT should enable this strategy by having a customer detail system where the moment customer calls, the system identifies him/her and prompts the address and the last order for the operator to provide a very personalize service where the customer feels important and saves his time as he/she doesn't have to provide delivery info etc. The system should print the kitchen ticket in the relevant branch kitchen to enable the30 minute delivery time. This is a simple example. Large scale ERP implementation, video conference facility implementation, vehicle tracking systems etc are more examples. In short, IT strategies should not be stand alone. They should be always supporting the business goals.
