Setting Principles and Initiating Next Practices to Reboot IT

It is a crucial time to keep the growth mentality and run IT as a digital accelerator.

With the increasing pace of changes, it's the critical time for the digital CIO leaders reimagine and reinvent IT for digital ready: What is the IT role in your company? Are you there to just keep the lights on, or is IT expected to actively take part in strategic and tactical decisions? How to set principles, develop the next practices, and reboot IT to get digital ready?

Setting guiding principles for IT management and talent management: The guiding principle is like the light tower, navigates IT toward the right direction and speed up the organization to the well-planned destination- from strategic direction (Is IT cost center or revenue generator?) to talent management (What kind of people should be working in your IT group? Do you want techies, business folks, project-oriented people? What rough percentage of each?) to IT performance (How is IT performance as an organization evaluated by the rest of the company? How will you measure success.) Keep in mind, setting principles and making policies to reinvent IT is not about putting restrictions on what you can do, it is more about monitoring and knowing when things are not going on the plan so that you can take appropriate actions at the right time. There needs to be a pragmatic way of applying whatever principles to the problem in a consistent manner. Otherwise, it is a waste of effort to even state them.

Developing the next practices and build the business competency: Doing daily grinding doesn’t mean IT should ignore its role refining. Indeed, continually refining its role as a strategic business partner, the digital capability multiplier and the innovation engine. In order to achieve business goals, organizations need to build a set of business capabilities, and IT is not just the sum of services or processes, but an enabler of business capabilities which can weave all necessary elements of the business into strategic capabilities and unique competency of the organization. A company has finite resources to apply to get the best yield possible to meet stakeholders’ expectation. And there are too many things in the daily agenda of IT. So there’re always some constraints for businesses to balance a healthy portfolio of “run, grow, and transform,” to explore the new opportunities or deploy the new ideas. Therefore, evaluation and prioritization are taken place to leverage resources in IT management.

Improving IT performance and measure it in the right way: When a CIO is able to position and maintain the IT organizational performance to ensure it addresses both "IT Effectiveness" and "IT Efficiency," they have earned their stripes. IT exists to enable and catalyze the business and the top IT performers are the ones who understand the business requirements, delivering on time, with the right technologies and solutions in collaboration with the business orientation; Enabling both business and IT to achieve organizational objectives. IT should work with stakeholders to develop the right set of measurement that shows how IT is improving business performance and enforcing business capabilities. Ensure that IT performance measures are quantitative, and implement whatever mechanisms you need to be able to gather the information and deliver the results.

Organizations are stepping into the deep digital normal with the increasing speed of changes. Technology is pervasive and the information is abundant. Business initiatives and digital transformation today nearly always involves some form of IT implementation, IT is a key enabler to build almost all differentiated digital capabilities nowadays. Do not waste the time -New Year is the crucial time to keep the growth mentality and run IT as the digital accelerator.

Posted in: IT Transformation,Principle/Practice