Saturday, August 5, 2017

IT is the lubricant to the fine tuned digital continuum

The role of digital IT today must become the lubricant to fine-tune digital continuum. IT is the solutionary to business problems, an optimizer for business processes and capabilities.

Organizations rely more and more on technologies; the IT department has more and more to overcome in streamlining information flow and running at digital speed. People tend to have high expectation of digital flow, very little patience with technology issues. IT has to continue improving its own business and services, as well as keep optimizing the company’s processes and competency. In digital organizations, IT is the lubricant to a fine-tuned digital continuum.


Digital IT has the wide spectrum of integration of services and solutions with continuous delivery: IT is no longer simply about infrastructure and applications, IT can even play a bigger role in re-framing of business planning processes in order,  along with re-framing of in-place processes that filter and fund investments, both business-oriented and technology-oriented. Software and hardware by themselves will never make a profit if a company’s products, people, and processes are not good and strong enough to compete in the marketplace. Therefore, digital IT has a wide spectrum of the integration of business solutions with a continuous delivery mode. IT as the lubricant can focus on driving, enabling, and orchestrating business changes and digital transformation in the area of integration of best-of-breed tools/services and innovation in the overall strategy of the enterprise. One of the biggest challenges of running a digital IT organization is about designing an approach to technology asset management that is affordable and nimble enough to flex to the changing needs of business, especially with the growing array of digital platforms, collaboration tools and multi-choices of lightweight digital technologies to select. That means, hierarchical lines will phase out and a collective of business partners will emerge working collaboratively to set digital strategy and achieve organizational goals collaboratively. In addition, innovation becomes a persistent, shared reality, even across silos and geographies, thus, IT needs to not only do the basics right to synchronize business but also do more with innovation and build a healthy innovation management portfolio which includes both incremental innovations and breakthrough innovation and truly contributes to the top line growth of the business.  
Digital IT organizations need to keep trimming wastes and redundancy, and avoid waste as well: Modern organizations become more and more complex due to the exponential growth of information and overly rigid organizational pyramid. There are both necessary complexity and unnecessary complication in it. Complexity is necessary because every intelligence has certain complexity it, on the other side though, unnecessary complication will stifle change and slow down the business speed. When a business becomes overly complex and people get frustrated and annoyed by not being able to accomplish things easily, this drives the search for simpler concepts and methods, which is the need to take the innovative initiative. Therefore, it is important to keep trimming wastes and redundancy, otherwise, over-complexity in business would hide simple and innovative ways to achieve things because the people involved just don't get the time to step back from the complexity and hence, they continue to follow the old routine to do the things. IT needs to continue fine-tuning the business infrastructure, applications, and services/solutions via consolidation, modernization, integration, optimization, innovation., etc. Besides eliminating cost, even more importantly, IT management should do more to avoid waste. Because eliminating waste is about eliminating something which is not used and saving effort on maintaining it. While avoiding waste is more about not building non-value adding features. It implies how to follow the simplicity principle to build as little as possible to maximize the work not done and maximize outcome and achieve the benefit for users and customers.


IT as the lubricant for smoothing connectivity to customers and suppliers, and how to cope with an ever-changing business logic: Digital blurs the geographical, functional, organizational, and even industrial borders nowadays. The hyper-connectivity of the digital organization enables the business to approach the flow zone for improving accountability. IT is an important lubricant to keep data flow, information flow, and digital flow, to ensure the right people getting the right information at the right time to make the right decisions. It means that the IT savvy organization can respond promptly to the change based on the business insight captured via information, or delight customers effortlessly based on the customer foresight refined via data, as well as prevent risks and avoid pitfalls intelligently. The aspect which matters is ensuring that the enterprise is connected to all the appropriate eco-system, lattice or otherwise, touch points, for improving idea flows, and catalyze digital innovation.


Traditional IT organizations are often perceived as change laggard. But the role of digital IT today must become the lubricant to fine-tune digital continuum. IT is a solutionary to business problems, an optimizer for business processes and capabilities, and an orchestrator for the digital transformation. The real goal of IT is to achieve business expectations. IT is on the way to drive change, catalyze business growth and improve organizational efficiency, effectiveness, performance, and maturity.


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