Every forward-thinking IT organization should explore a unique path to innovate and digitize, proactively push ideas to achieve high performance business results.
Many companies are at the tipping point for the digital transformation journey, more and more businesses empower their IT to lead changes and catalyze business growth. Due to the overwhelming growth of information and disruptive nature of technologies, IT is at the crossroad, either ride the learning curve and explore a unique path to build differentiated competency, or just keep the lights on only, react to the business’s requests and become irrelevant. Some high-performing IT organizations have moved up its maturity to become the innovation hub and game changer in their companies, how can they make it?
Many companies are at the tipping point for the digital transformation journey, more and more businesses empower their IT to lead changes and catalyze business growth. Due to the overwhelming growth of information and disruptive nature of technologies, IT is at the crossroad, either ride the learning curve and explore a unique path to build differentiated competency, or just keep the lights on only, react to the business’s requests and become irrelevant. Some high-performing IT organizations have moved up its maturity to become the innovation hub and game changer in their companies, how can they make it?
Closer to the end customers: Digital is the age of the customer, being a customer-centric business is in every forward-thinking organization’s top executive agenda. IT has two sets of customers: The internal business customers as well as the end customers of the companies. To reinvent its image as the business catalyzer, IT needs to be closer to the end customers and do more with innovation. Innovation happens at the intersection of customers and technologies. Thus, customers become an important link in the innovation process. The end customer (including prospects) should be studied and observed, and delighting customers can become the stepping stone to improve IT maturity. Corporate IT plays a significant role in digitizing every touch point of customer experience and building key business capabilities. Remember innovation must prove its value in the market. Customers must be willing to pay for this, be it a product, process or service innovation. IT is at the unique position to oversee the underlying business functions and processes. Hence, it has better advantages to make deep observations and have an empathetic understanding of customers. This involves gaining a deep knowledge of the motivational construct of the customer, in order that IT can become "anticipatory" of what the customer will likely "want next," and apply a more inductive approach as to what the customer wants to accomplish “next.” It is important to think when talking about innovation, not purely about technological advancements or breakthrough innovations, but also about different propositions, approaches to a problem or new interpretations, with customers as the center of innovations.
Communication, collaboration, and co-creation: Traditional IT organizations are often perceived as a back office function to keep the lights on with a controller’s mentality; to innovate IT and accelerate changes, it is a fundamental initiative to improve the important IT-business relationship that is essential to the business’s long-term success. It means having IT and business collaborate as equal partners to harness communication, enforce collaboration, and co-create innovative solutions, so that, organizations, people, strategies, etc, work in harmony, such that business initiatives, especially those focused on leveraging IT to increase revenues are successful. The crux of the question is what an IT leader must plan for, articulate and, of course, execute to match the demands of the business and customers; set and communicate the forward-looking vision, and leverage IT funding to innovating for the business's long-term prosperity and success.

When everyone just follows the industry best practices to run IT for “keeping the lights on,” there is no way IT can stand out. Break the old rules when it is necessary, experiment and develop the next practices to innovate IT. Both fast-growing businesses and well-established organizations set top priorities to build new capabilities in which IT is a key enabler. Every forward-thinking IT organization should explore a unique path to innovate and digitize, proactively push ideas on how to leverage powerful digital technologies to drive revenue growth, increase business productivity, flexibility, and performance.
0 comments:
Post a Comment