Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Running a Propositive, Personalized, and Persuasive Digital IT Organization

Due to the varying nature of organizations and business dynamic, there is no one size fitting all magic formula on how to run a high-innovative and high-mature IT organizations. 

As businesses move into the digital future, technology is the fastest growing arena, IT is in the middle of a sea change. Digital CIOs have to deal with constant ambiguity, rising complexity, increasing velocity, and unprecedented uncertainty, they shouldn’t get stuck with “we always do things like this” mentality and they have to keep IT relevant by running a propositive, personalized and persuasive digital organization for building a strong reputation as the business partner .

Propositive IT: Running a “propositive” IT organization means IT becomes more visible, approachable, and measurable. IT leaders have the positive attitude to change things for better and make continuous improvement, also take a proactive approach for leading ahead of the pack and breaking the status quo. In most of the organizations, IT is setting back and waiting for the request as an order taker. But with fast-paced changes, fierce competitions, and intense business dynamic, IT has to be configured in a way to understand the business, embedded into business decision making, proactively take initiatives for either solving business problems or catalyzing innovation. IT leaders should understand the stakeholders’ expectations, propose a balanced “run, grow, and transform” products/services portfolio that corresponds to both demand and cost drivers with a focus on setting business priorities and builds differentiated organizational competency. There is always some frictions between the corporation and business units. To close the gap between IT and business, and run a propositive IT organization, the connection between IT and businesses lies in leveraging the common language to help the business across that bridge to IT; IT leaders need to work closely with the business from the outside-in lens, share fresh insight and great ideas, understand the true business problems and deliver the business and market need consistently.

Personalized IT: The digital organization is more like the living thing with its unique identity and strength, in part because ways of doing business and customer expectations both tend to be more flexible than the siloed industrial age. To keep IT relevant, providing the personalized services or solutions to customers become an important aspect of running a customer-centric organization. As IT is increasingly supportive of the competitive position of the company, a clear understanding of what services or solutions are supporting your competitive advantage is needed. To run a personalized IT with its unique strength, IT leaders should take a careful consideration about which knowledge or skills have to be secured; what are commoditized services; and what are differentiated competencies. To improve the IT maturity level, leading IT organizations are moving from “aligning IT with the business,” to “aligning IT to customers.” IT has two sets of customers; the internal customers and end customers. The personalized IT provides customers with an impression of how IT can tailor their needs to solve business problems and gain customer satisfaction. IT can deploy information to help business capture real-time customer insight, understand their needs and improve customer experience; make the investment for new products or services customers really need and capture the opportunities for improving business growth.

Persuasive IT: The role of the CIO continues to evolve rapidly in the midst of the overwhelming information growth and the accelerated changes in technology. To reinvent IT as the trustful business partner, CIOs need to be inspirational for changes and persuasive to share the technological vision and being persuasive to promote IT value proposition. IT leaders should be persuasive to advocate new ideas as well, the persuasive focus is great for leading and selling the vision. There are times when IT will be the only party in the room with in-depth views of the business and technique know-how about the underlying functions and processes. CIOs must understand the real issues or opportunities, and they should deliver a clear message to the colleagues on C-level and convince them to support their ideas for either sponsoring changes or making wise investments. Forward-thinking businesses across the industry sectors invite their IT leaders to the big table; CIOs need to develop financial metrics that will help to clearly and persuasively communicate IT performance with C-level executives in the plain business language with the hard numbers they are interested in. Digital IT leaders and professionals have both proficient business knowledge and technical expertise so that they can apply such knowledge and experience to identify, sell, and promote new processes and platforms that can give business leverage in its domain and sector.

Due to the varying nature of organizations and business dynamic, there is no one size fitting all magic formula on how to run a high-innovative and high-mature IT organizations. Running a propositive, personalized, and persuasive IT as a business inside the business - that's the way to go for getting digital ready.

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