Someone once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

Of course, when you use Windows, doing the same thing twice really can lead to different results, so what does that tell you about our industry?

One of the things we seem to do over and over again in IS is waste a lot of time in studies that never get used. IS strategic plans are a popular example.

Don’t get me wrong. IS needs a plan, and that plan must include strategic considerations. It had better include more than that, too. A “strategic plan” is only about achieving strategic direction, ignoring the practicalities of day-to-day operation that absorb all of your resources and more. Put simply: It’s a castle in the air you can never build.

That’s why you need an integrated plan. An integrated plan includes strategic components — it defines the future — but also deals with the realities of your current operating environment. An integrated plan gives you a roadmap for where you’re going, and it also helps you survive until the future gets here.

You can operate without an integrated plan, but then IS becomes an order-taker, providing nothing more than a lot of unfocused activity that solves small problems without moving the company forward. Your projects may be well worth doing, and may generate a lovely return on investments, or ROI. Best of all, they’re safe. They just don’t change the status quo in any meaningful way.

This week starts a series that gives you an outline for your plan. It isn’t, however, an instruction manual. That would take a book I haven’t written yet.

An integrated IS plan has three main sections: Company Goals; Technical Architecture; and Human Factors. The Company Goals section documents where the company is going and the role technology will play in getting it there. Technical Architecture describes the whole corporate systems framework to be used. And the Human Factors section deals with … well, the people who will make it all happen.

Let’s zoom in on the Company Goals section. It divides goals into three subtopics: strategic, tactical, and operational.

Strategic goals describe a significant change to the company’s business model. They call for the delivery of new capabilities by IS to not just enable, but facilitate, the change. You’ll never demonstrate a return on investment for projects that address them, by the way. In all likelihood, the company itself hasn’t tried to demonstrate a return on investment for achieving its strategy.

Tactical goals make your company better at its core business processes. Satisfying these goals lets your company do things faster, cheaper, or with higher quality, so they generate a solid ROI. Nothing fundamental changes, though. You’re still the same company making the same stuff for the same customers.

Operational goals deal with the company infrastructure … in systems terms, the telephone system, e-mail, and word processing software that is used throughout the organization for a wide variety of general office tasks. It’s plumbing, invisible until it breaks. If you want to sponsor unified messaging technology, here’s where it fits into the big picture.

You aren’t a passive recipient of the company’s goals, for two reasons. First, they’re never expressed in a form you can use — you need to apply a lot of insight to turn the company’s strategic, tactical, and operational goals into IS departmental requirements.

Second, you should actively participate in their formulation, because technology, more than any other single factor, drives the external changes that will make your company’s current business model obsolete. And who on the executive team knows more about the future of technology than you?