Reliability, flexibility, profits with ROIs, optimization for improving business efficiency should be the driving force behind IT management.
With the fast pace of changes and continuous disruptions, IT has been pushed out of its comfort zone as a back office and become a frontrunner for accelerating digitalization. The trend of technology consumerization indeed provides unprecedented opportunities for IT to get more touch base with end customers and improve the top-line business growth. IT is the important and also expensive investment in most of the organizations, whether it is "planning" or "performance," "process" or "people," “Information” or “innovation.” How to run a high performance IT with reliability, flexibility, and profitability?
Reliability: “Keep the lights on” is always fundamental to run a reliable IT organization. IT plays a crucial role to ensure that the organization’s systems are reliable and run when needed and when the users expect them to run. Quick-fixing the handy issues is also necessary to build a good IT reputation. Make sure IT systems running following the preplanned schedule and performance standards. If there is a day-to-day operation break/fix type of issue in relation to a business-critical technology, an effective CIO has to first stop the pain, take care of chronic operational issues and deliver much-requested upgrades and tactical solutions. Many IT organizations in legacy organizations or in legacy industries spend significant time, cost and resource to maintain the heavy legacy applications. IT leaders need to truly work hard on achieving IT management excellence which is more as a journey than a destination. Because information, technology, and other IT assets and resources need to be centralized, reallocated, updated or replaced if needed to improve business efficiency, optimize processes, and build the business capacity and competency.
Flexibility: Running a real-time digital organization means high-responsiveness and high speed. Because the ways of doing business and meeting customer expectations both tend to be more flexible than the siloed industrial age. The degree of business responsiveness depends on how those systems and subsystems interact with each other, and those interactions can be structural, technical, informational, or human. IT flexibility and maintainability are dependent on the proper module design architecture, with reusability and process flow, etc. CIOs are in the right position to set good policies to ensure information and technology accessibility, responsiveness, reliability, to help the business achieve strategic responsiveness and organizational flexibility. There’s always a compromise to make, and balance to strike for quality and speed. Digital organizations must have strategic responsiveness to process business information almost real-time, communicate and collaborate with business counterparts timely. The reality is that organizations that do not respond to external environmental changes will quickly outcompete nimbler and more adaptable companies catch up and take their customers. IT organization needs to have the flexibility to take the different approach with the adaptability to meet the business’s expectation.
IT needs to build a good reputation as a trusted business partner and an innovative problem-solver. Thus, reliability, flexibility, profits with ROIs, optimization for improving business efficiency should be the driving force behind IT management. IT digitalization is the journey of making continuous improvement and doing more with innovation.
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