The CIO’s Digital Agenda: Running IT as a Digital Transformer Aug. 2016

IT plays a significant role in driving business changes, and leading organizations' digital transformation.

IT is the foundation of data, information, and modern knowledge. The biggest misnomer regarding IT is that it is "just technology." Digital is about the rapidly change and continuous business flow, and IT becomes a changing organization to driving business transformation. How to fine tune IT to become a change agent and get the business digital ready?

Running IT as a Change Organization  

• How to Run IT as a Changing Organization: For forward-looking and highly mature organizations,  the IT department has become synonymous with the change department: In order to make effective changes,  you have to know the underneath structure and processes of your business, because they underpin digital capabilities of the organization. How do you make changes to anything without knowing all the parts and how they are related?

• Running IT as Digital Catalyzer? IT is on the big shift to transform from a cost center to a business value creator, from a help desk to a growth engine; IT should devote more attention to what organizations really care about - managing information to capture insight and foresight, putting technology to business advantage. However, there is the gap between the aspirations of what IT could do to the business versus what the current IT “mentality” and capability within the respective IT department is capable of providing and enabling. How can IT close communication and capability gaps, and what is the focal point to run IT as the digital catalyzer and improve its effectiveness, agility, and innovativeness?

• Is IT Organization as Responsive as it needs to Be?  Without a doubt, IT is the most difficult and challenging part of a company due to its change nature. Nowadays, information is the lifeblood of an organization, and technology is more often the innovation driver. And the speed of change is accelerated at the digital age. So is your IT organization as responsive as it needs to be? What does the digital shift mean to IT organizations?

• A Change Agent IT? With the emerging technological trends such as SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud) and IT consumerization & Internet of the Things, more often than not, IT plays a significant role in driving business changes, and leading organizations' digital transformation. Because the digital transformation is driven by technology; and not just by technology, but by user-driven technology. Sure, in today's world, technology is driving business transformation, unlike previous eras during which business transformation was driven by business ideas. This is a golden opportunity for CIOs to lead the way by enabling, governing and optimizing the consumer-driven technology that's going viral in the enterprise. But how to run IT as a change agent for business transformation.

• Running IT as a Digital Transformer: We live in a fast-paced digital world, and every day more and more technologies affect the way we live, think, and love. Great opportunities, pitfalls, and disruptions are around every corner. Digital transformation is inevitable, transformation means to change the "nature" of something, albeit that the increasing pace of technological advances has clearly impacted the nature and scope of opportunities or disruptions. Hence, IT has become mission critical, it is imperative for IT and business leaders to work effectively and efficiently together to ensure that they are leveraging IT across their organizations to attain enterprise-wide transformation; not just using IT as a digital extension, but running IT as a digital transformer.

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Posted in: Change Management,IT Transformation,Sum UP