Monday, April 22, 2019

Running IT as Innovative Achiever

Running IT as an innovative achiever is all about doing things better, differentiate yourself from competitions, run, grow and transform the business harmoniously.

Businesses today face numerous challenges, fiery competitions and rapid changes either technologically or economically. Companies across the industrial sector are on the journey of significant transformation. Many IT organizations are at the crossroad to either reinvent themselves or become irrelevant. Every forward-thinking CIO needs to ask themselves and others: Shall we continually be operated as a support center or become a business differentiator? Do we have a harmonized vision about overall IT competency and organizational maturity? Which role should or can IT play in the digital organization to keep it relevant and lift up the organization to the next growth cycle and accelerate business performance?

Tap unique leverage: Each functional unit can bring a unique perspective and a set of business competencies to the table. It should start at the strategic level, IT, marketing, finance, HR., etc, all have its own subsection of the overall business strategy. But what the part of the value IT can offer is a way of looking at things that are analytical, dynamic, or structural from a holistic angle, because IT is in a unique position to oversee businesses processes and architectures. There are times when IT will be the only party in the room with multidimensional business views. IT needs to apply the enriched knowledge and experiences to identify opportunities, promote advanced technological platforms or tools, and lead business transformation proactively. Organizations today have to deal with uncertainty, ambiguity, and exponential growth of information on the daily based. It is invaluable for both business and IT to know what’s going on in each other’s space and why; they must rely on their strengths to build relevant business capacity and core organizational competencies. Digital CIOs need to capture business insight and develop all necessary leadership skillsets, to understand the company’s business model, go to market approach, and business vision to enable the strategy execution with business solution deliverable. IT will be more productive, innovative, and influential if putting the focus on achieving operational excellence, tapping unique leverage, providing great products or services, and collaborating with the business to become customer-centric and solve their problems creatively.

Enforce personalization: With unprecedented convenience brought by lightweight technologies and abundant information, the digital organization is more like the living thing with its unique identity, in part because ways of doing business and customer expectations both tend to become more flexible than the siloed industrial age. Great personalization leads to a better understanding by designing tailored applications or solutions to delight customers. It requires IT leaders and staff to work closely with the business and take a systematic view of framing the right problems and providing tailored solutions. With continuous disruptions often caused by technologies, the businesses are looking to IT for leadership around the competitive application of information & technology in a rapidly changing market. The new normal of running a customer-centric organization is to provide personalized products or services to customers and improve their purchasing experience with the company. To run IT as an innovative achiever, both prioritization and personalization are important. In general, careful considerations must be made about which knowledge or skills have to be secured; what are commoditized services and what are competitive differentiators; what services can be purchased outside; and which capability should be built in-house. Talented IT staffs are not only technical specialists but rather of business gurus, who also happen to be technically proficient, they can understand real business problems and investigate innovative solutions diligently.

Channel creative energy: While the individual contributions provide the 'building block" of creativity, the horizon of creativity is expanded by manifesting creativity from an individual endeavor to a team activity and collective effort. Creativity can manifest in a collective environment. It is the synchronization of their individual inputs to make something that no single individual could achieve alone. The collective creativity can revitalize the organizational culture and catalyze innovation. In the business environment, being innovative is a state of mind. You have to live it and breathe it every day, otherwise, you would feel stuck and the business will get stale. Highly creative people in the team or across the teams brainstorm, collaborate, clarify, develop on each other's ideas, discover nuances and channel creative energy. Innovation will happen when people are not limited by overly rigid rules or structures; they are given free space to be creative without bureaucratic management discipline to hold them back; they are encouraged to think differently, experiment with new ways to do things and have the right dose of risk appetite and a positive attitude to fail forward.

IT has a great opportunity to catalyze innovation and lead the digital transformation. Innovation is not just about technology or equal to the latest gadget. It’s about people, culture, partnership, and manners, etc. CIOs need to be creative enough to think out-of-the-box for embracing great ideas; and logical enough to plan, engineer and follow through. Running IT as an innovative achiever is all about doing things better, differentiate yourself from competitions, run, grow and transform the business harmoniously.

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