A Balanced IT

The pervasive digitalization or IT consumerism require the balance of “old experience” and “new way to do things,” the “learning and doing.”

The emerging digital technologies such as Cloud, Mobile, Social, and Analytics bring new opportunity to run IT organization faster and agiler. For many legacy organizations, how does IT support the existing environment while deploying innovative, "value generating" initiatives? Or to put simply, what are the effective ways to meet these challenge? And how to run a balanced IT to both keeping the light on and accelerating digital transformation?

Keep the balance of “on-premise” and “on demand” IT applications: You can run applications with scalability. Now, you can build virtual servers on top of these clusters that can be scaled up and down as needed. You can build a private cloud, or you can leverage the public cloud, or you can even use a hybrid approach. To a lot of people who aren't all that well-versed in technology, the cloud is magical, the ethereal body that contains a bunch of handy applications and more storage than they could ever need for all of their personal usages such as pictures, videos, and emails. In reality, these are services running on top of a vendor's cloud. Now, there are no-brainers as far as "cloud" apps go. In each situation, consideration must be given to what the consequences of a data breach or downtime might be, and how easy it is to recover from the worst case scenario. If you're running the apps yourself, you are more in control of risk management, governance, and compliance, and it’s better able to deal with an outage. If a third party is responsible, you're beholden to them (no matter what your contract may stipulate). So how do you weave "the cloud" into the digital IT picture, and keep the balance of “on-premise” and “on demand” IT applications, to ensure IT is running with faster speed, reliability, and agility. That is both the art and science of strategic planning, step-by-step execution and solid approach to governance and risk management.

Keep the balance of IT stability and speed: Technology Enablement is always about planning, funding, designing, building, operating, securing, optimizing and balancing, but digital IT has faster speed. The impact of today’s technologies, and their integration with the other new technologies, and like in the past the integration with “older” technologies, seems to be more profound, especially given the concurrent ecosystem changes going on (digitalization, economically dynamic, globalization). To be successful, IT leaders must support the existing environment (provide a reliable secure infrastructure, maintain the application portfolio) while deploying innovative value generating (business cost reduction and revenue generating) initiatives that are leveraging SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud) technologies. Technology Enablement (regardless of the extent of digitization), is all about planning, funding, designing, building, operating, securing, optimizing and managing digitized data/documents/messages, and digitized business processes applied today, have become even more critical to today’s organizational successes.

The pervasive digitalization or IT consumerism requires the balance of “old experience” and “new way to do things,” the “learning and doing”: We have more computing power, greater connectivity, more data, greater potential empowerment of the worker, etc. But more of something isn't always necessarily good. There are at least four things that are different from 'business as usual.' First, pervasive digitization requires both business and technology professionals to rethink how things are done in organizations. The 'reach and range' flexibility that now exists removes barriers that have existed in the past if we can recognize the barriers. Second, business professionals are not infrequently 'ahead' of their organization's technology professionals when it comes to thinking about the opportunities made available by pervasive digitization (what some technology pundits refer to as 'IT consumerism.') Third, media and platform choices will matter more than ever with the increasing ease of translating content across media types and the ease of migrating across platforms. How this cornucopia of design options is exploited and managed thus becomes a crucial factor in an organization's success in producing digitized products and services. Finally, the emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern or exponential speed, as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. How these ideas are recognized, filtered and dealt with a will as well become a crucial factor in an organization's success in running a balanced IT and producing digitized products and services.

Do not underestimate the perfect wave of combined integration of all of the exponential growth curves. The forward-looking organizations always continue to learn and strike the right balance between “old” and “new” way to do things. IT-business alignment is moving into IT enablement and IT engagement. So, perhaps more importantly, whether one believes that the current experience is a transformation or just an extension of the past, what are the things that you can do as IT and non-IT leaders to leverage the experiences of the past, and what are some new lessons for you to consider through applying Cloud and other digital technologies? The ultimate goal is to build a balanced, high-performing and customer-centric IT organization.

Posted in: Hybrid,IT Transformation