Saturday, April 1, 2017

Three Characteristics of Digital Ready IT

Digital is about hyperconnectivity, change, and people-centricity, closer to reality is that 'change' is continuously happening in such a dynamic environment of a company.


Organizations today have to become highly responsive, dynamic, and hyperconnected. We have transitioned from an industrial age with the scarcity of knowledge to the digital era with information overloading. A digital business ecosystem is open, fluid, dynamic and energetic because the speed of change is exponentially increasing. IT plays a significant role in such a paradigm shift because information is the lifeblood, and technology is the backbone of the modern organizations, The forward-looking organizations across the industrial sectors claim they are in the information management business. So, how to transform IT from a support function to a digital growth engine, and what are characteristics of digital-ready IT?


Hyperconnectivity with digital balance: Traditional organizations were run in silos at the industrial age, due to lack of information and scarce of knowledge, often the classic management has a too narrow view of changes. It is important to broaden the outlook and run IT as the business, to strike the right balance of business effectiveness and efficiency, speed and stability, innovation and standardization.  Today’s organizations are at a crossroads where the segregation or silo of business units are at a need to reach across the aisles and respectively work with each other. It is a strategic imperative to broaden the outlook and envision the bigger picture of digitalization. Each business function brings a unique perspective and a set of skills to the table. Business unit must also each lend this view to the executive office and participate in decisions about business strategy. Because IT is in a unique position to have an oversight view of enterprise processes. IT is also the integrator to glue the functional silos to the whole. To make the link strong and the outlook clear is to empower the IT team and make them think through the business world while working on the solutions. The biggest IT challenge is the pace at which the IT executive's responsibility for business operations, efficiency, effectiveness, and continuity is outpacing his or her authority to make those areas a success.


People-centricity: Though the majority of IT organizations still get stuck at the lower level of maturity, work on making the alignment with the business to keep the bottom line. The leading businesses already think ahead to align with their customers, with the goals to improve the top line growth. Since the biggest challenge to business success is IT and the biggest challenge of IT is about understanding the business and customers’ expectations. Digital is the age of people-centricity. Engaging and empowering your end user is vital for improving IT maturity. Technology is being leveraged every day to digitize the touch point and enhance the customer experience with or without the user cases from an IT department. In reality, if the IT department does not have the time, resources or authority to develop and deploy these initiatives, they will not be brought to the big table as a business partner or customer champion. IT should also empower their internal users with efficient tools to improve their productivity and satisfaction. IT is shifting its focus from inside-out operation driven to outside-in customer-centric for getting digital ready.

Digital fluidity: Digital means flow -the information flow, idea flow, mind flow, and business flow, with this shift, it has come to a change in organizational forms away from the traditional rigid hierarchies managed through command and control to more fluid and responsive network forms. 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, in order to make the right decisions. Information and knowledge do not stand still! It flows into the company, it flows out of it, it erodes; it gets created, and hopefully, it flows to the customers of the company in terms of product and service delivery as well. Digital is the age of innovation. The main barriers to innovation are silos, rigidity, inflexibility, static mindset, or bureaucracy, etc. Idea flow can be streamlined via enforcing cross-functional communication, using common business language for harnessing understanding. It is important to build scalable idea management which means for sharing and managing ideas throughout the enterprise, even across silos and geographies. It is also important to update the performance system and take incentives to encourage sharing, paying more attention to ideas from others, and setting prioritization - select the ideas which can have a better opportunity to implement and maximize business value, skills - to practice capability based idea management. It is easy to work alone and take the attitude of competition, but it is much more difficult to collaborate with different parties even competitors. But businesses can flow smoothly to catalyze change via cross-functional collaboration which is enabled by iterative communications, robust processes, and management innovation.


Digital is about hyperconnectivity, change, and people-centricity, closer to reality is that 'change' is continuously happening in such a dynamic environment of a company. IT has to reinvent itself via evolving change proactively and retool the business via optimizing the underlying business functions and processes. Transformation is a journey rather than a destination. A digital-ready IT is a thresholding competency of the organization for stretching out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation.




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