The Digital CIO’s “Just-In-Time” IT Management Approach

Today’s organizations are at a crossroads where the segregation or siloing of business units are at a need to reach across the aisles and respectively work with each other to respond to changes in the real time. 

Nowadays, information is growing exponentially and technology changes so quickly. CIOs should be clear on what needs to achieve in terms of top line, bottom line, and working in tandem with other departments to achieve IT goals. For adapting to the increasing pace of changes and continuous disruptions, digital CIOs should practice intrapreneur leadership, leverage just-in-time IT management discipline to run IT as the business and reinvent their organizations to get digital ready.

Just-in-time IT resource management: Often time, IT organizations are overloaded and under-delivery, get stuck at the lower level of maturity to keep the lights on only. To improve IT effectiveness and responsiveness, successful capacity planning and resource management are critical to ensuring that IT resource is available before they are needed. IT capacity planning process must obtain accurate information on business growth needs. IT leaders should see just-in-time resources and capacity management as an opportunity to be proactively participating business strategy planning in advance so that they are on the right track to becoming the strategic business partner. Because IT investment is costly and IT resource is limited, resource allocation is critical to IT management prioritization. IT capacity planning needs to be part of the corporate initiatives around continuous business improvement. The resource allocation scenario needs to be transparent, helps IT management take advantage of resource effectively, optimize cost, and manage a healthy “run, grow, transform” IT portfolio, in order to build the long-term business strategy. The just-in-time IT resource management and dynamic IT capacity program will enable CIOs to switch to the proactive mode of "running IT as the business."

Just-in-time information/ knowledge management: Information is one of the most invaluable assets besides people in modern businesses. The power of information is to empower the business with real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before. Therefore, just-in-time information/knowledge management is crucial for running a real-time digital organization. Just-in-time information/knowledge management involves the use of technologies and processes of capturing, developing, sharing, and effectively refining information and applying organizational knowledge timely, acquiring the ability to reshape products/services/customer engagement, with the aim of optimizing the business value that is generated. With real-time customer foresight, the digital CIOs can genuinely engage both internal and external customers, even know what the customers want before they know themselves. The executive scoreboard or management dashboard filling with real-time business insight enables IT leaders to review key people, finance, operational deliverables periodically and manage IT scientifically.

Just-in-time Innovation Management: Digital is the age of innovation. The pace of business change is significantly increasing, innovation is the only path and the core activity of human evolution to the changing of the environment for unlocking business performance. IT needs to become the business’s innovation engine, rather than just tools or a support desk. Just-in-time innovation means that innovation management needs to become a “living process,” with frequent evaluations, listening, and revision. IT has to be configured in a way to understand the business and set the architecture to deliver the business and market need. In order to delivery just-in-time innovation, IT cannot set back and wait for the request from the customers. IT management needs to engage with the business units to figure out how the department is perceived, what the pain points are and how to identify opportunities for developing new services/products or improving/optimizing current ones. To facilitate idea creation, the enterprise social platforms and powerful digital collaboration tools make it much easier to share ideas, trigger just-in-time creativity, harness communication, and scale up innovation best practices. To deliver just-in-time innovation, it is also important to allocate time and resource to the people in charge and deliver innovative solutions to the customers on value and on time.

Today’s organizations are at a crossroads where the segregation or siloing of business units are at a need to reach across the aisles and respectively work with each other to respond to changes in the real time. IT is the linchpin to build a hyperconnected and always-on real-time digital powerhouse. CIOs are not just the static IT management role, they are dynamic leaders who will practice “Just-in-time” IT management practices all the time, to enable enterprises becoming nimbler and gaining the competitive advantage in the long run.

Posted in: CIO Leadership,IT Transformation