The New Book “Digital IT - 100 Q&As” Chapter 2 Digital IT Fitness Q&As ~ Future of CIO

Thursday, April 13, 2017

The New Book “Digital IT - 100 Q&As” Chapter 2 Digital IT Fitness Q&As

10:18 PM Pearl Zhu 1 comment

The digital paradigm shift is inevitable. Keeping digital fit means the fitting mindset, fitting attitude, fitting structure, and fitting speed.

The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. The multidimensional digital transformation provides impressive advantages in terms of the speed of delivering business solutions and ability to adapt to changes. So, how can organizations keep digital fit and highly-responsive because nowadays digital businesses need to be fast, always “on,” highly connected, interdependent, and ultra-competitive? Which healthy digital debates should you inspire in order to brainstorm the better way for running IT effectively, efficiently, and innovatively?

Should you put your IT on a diet: With the continuous drive from their senior management team to drive out the cost, IT needs to prune the weed regularly. The approach is to implement a program that like a gardener would prune the tree and nurture the valuable solutions. In many IT organizations, they want to transform IT but have no mechanism to articulate the cost or value of these systems. Many IT organizations in traditional companies and industries spend the significant time, cost and resource to maintain the heavy out of date IT system and legacy application, and are perceived as the cost center. Hence, to keep digital fit, IT has to set the priority right to both keep the lights on as well as optimizing IT cost and run a balanced IT portfolio. It takes both strategy and discipline to transform IT from a cost center to value creator; from a controller always saying “NO” to the users to the innovator that brings change to itself as well as the business-wide scope, and from a big fat silo to the digital fit brain of modern organizations.

How to run IT from inside-out operation driven to outside-in customer-centric? Traditional IT organizations are inside out operation-driven, it was often run as a siloed function and support function with the lower level of maturity. However, nowadays, at the dawn of the Digital Era, information is one of the most valuable business assets and technologies are disruptive forces behind the digital transformation, IT plays a crucial role in optimizing and digitizing every touch point of customer experience and improving overall customer satisfaction. The next practice of IT management is to live as “customers.” One of the mistakes that IT ever makes is to run IT project as a purely technical challenge, without “keeping the end in mind” - the customer needs and business goals. So, being customer-centric is a strategic objective, not just a performance indicator.

How can an organization approach the digital flow zone: Organizations like individuals, need to be in flow to operate smoothly. An organization achieves this state of equilibrium through its management layer optimization. The aim of modern information management has often been described as getting the right information to the right person in the right format and medium at the right time. It is crucial to keep information and knowledge flow in the digital ecosystem. Information and knowledge do not stand still, it flows into the company, it flows out of it. IT as the information steward of the business can achieve the qualitative and measurable value of information to catalyze the business growth, also solve the business pains underlying it, and unlock the full digital potential of the organization. A digital business ecosystem is open, fluid, fit, dynamic and energetic, high-effective organizations today have to become highly responsive, dynamic, and hyperconnected.