A Hyper-wired IT without Wire

The hyper-wired IT can leverage the emergent digital technologies with fewer wires, catalyze the change, and drive digital transformation.

Digital means the increasing speed of changes, hyperconnectivity, and always-on business dynamic. The digital hyperconnectivity is breaking down the functional borders, business borders, and even industrial or national borders. IT plays a more significant role in leading changes and driving digital transformation. However, traditional IT organizations are often perceived by the business as a big cold, isolated function with monolithic hard boxes and tangled wires, surrounding with IT staff stereotyped as geeks who speak the different language and lack of business acumen to ask insight questions. To run IT with digital speed, it has to shift from a monolithic back office function to the lightweight digital brain yard. But how to run a hyper-wired IT without wire, for improving the overall business agility and maturity?

Digital IT is information-driven and built to change: IT organization is shifting from technology oriented to I-information driven. Information is the lifeblood of the enterprise, information and its life cycle is complex. It’s about how an enterprise will leverage information to power its business via optimizing the value of information while minimizing risks. Because the right business decision needs to follow with the prompt information/action technology. But if not properly managed, it becomes at worst case a liability and at best case an underutilized asset. By leveraging the emergent “SMAC” digital technologies, the digital IT mantra is also shifting from “built to last,” to “built to change.” The idea of moving fast, moving to new technologies to be flexible and responsible, shortening the information management life cycle, is to improve the business agility, because organizations that do not respond to external environmental changes will quickly be out-competed, and faded into the background soon. IT, in fact, needs to be getting wired (with fewer wires) and help weave all these important business elements such as business processes, digital technology and tools into the building blocks of change capability and differentiated business competency. It is not necessary for IT to build everything from scratch, It is a part of the digital mentality that systems can be purchased or access contracted with the concept that SAAS are instantaneous solutions to an organization’s business challenges, for accelerating speed and making the continuous delivery.

Digital synchronization: The hyper-wired IT is like the digital brain of the organization, retrieving and processing information, analyzing, synthesizing, memorizing and most importantly, perceiving the future of business, providing the business insight about the opportunities and possibilities. It also helps the business become more innovative via connecting the wider dots and experimenting a new way to do things. That means IT strategy is an integral part of business strategy, IT needs to really understand the business strategy and synchronize with business goals via building the 'right' bridge between IT and business. Closing the gap is about doing the basics right to synchronize business and IT to orchestrate digital symphony. Digital IT transformation is the journey to shift from enterprise IT for standardization to experiment the consumerization of IT for harnessing personalization; from running IT with siloed management mentality to practice holistic thinking with hyper-connected and hybrid human/IT intelligence; from delivering projects on-time, o-budget to on value and on customer centricity.

A hyper-wired digital IT can keep involving and building dynamic digital capability for adapting to changes: Digital businesses become more dynamic and hyperconnected, organizations have to enable the desirable emergent property, either being called synergy or ongoing capability because they are the business competency and key differentiator to build high-performing digital businesses. IT is a key attribute to business capabilities for building a high-performance enterprise. IT matters not only because it’s pervasive, more about it continues to advance, and its nature of the "constructive disruption." The hyper-wired IT can focus on driving, enabling and orchestrating business change and digital transformation in the areas of integration of best-of-breed tools/services and innovation in the overall strategy of the enterprise. One of the biggest challenges of running a digital IT is designing an approach to technology asset management that is affordable and nimble enough to flex to the changing needs of business, especially with the growing array of digital platforms and multi-choices of technology available to select.

The digital business is always on and hyper-connected; a digital business ecosystem is open, fluid, dynamic and energetic because the speed of change is exponentially increasing. The hyper-wired IT can leverage the emergent digital technologies with fewer wires, catalyze the change, shorten the business solution delivery cycle, and make a leap of digital transformation effortlessly.

Posted in: IT Innovation,IT Transformation