Leverage Design Factors to Reinvent IT

Due to the changing nature of technology, the IT organization has to continue to re-imagine and reshuffle itself for adapting to changes.

A digital organization starts with a transcendent purpose that leads to a unique natural design, a design most fit to achieve the purpose of businesses. IT is the linchpin of the business’s digital transformation. It could be necessary to reinvent IT by applying Design Thinking and asking tough questions: What factors drive the restructuring or IT innovation? How is the structure of your IT department aligned with the organization? Do you allow room for adjustments, keeping it dynamic, and how can you leverage design factors to improve IT maturity from functioning to firm to delight?

Design to fit: Design Thinking is a unique path of pursuing innovation. From the IT management perspective, the “organizational design problem” would be to build the “best” mix of organizational elements that enable organizational interdependence. The methodologies and practices being put into design thinking bucket are somewhat unique and previously outside of the business norm, but have the great potential to run customer-centric IT organization. The next practice of IT management is to live as “customers.” IT plays a crucial role in optimizing and digitizing every touch point of customer experience and improving overall customer experiences. From the product delivery perspective, design in digital product development is a full lifecycle of research - define - design - prototype - iterate - test, with the characteristics of nonlinearity and iteration, to improve overall user experiences. From business process management perspective, mapping of high-level business processes to technology implementation must be in place to allow for an understanding of the impact of strategic changes, and open discussions across business lines on the steps that need to be taken to reach ultimate business goals. Collect feedback and capture insight from various business units, do the necessary adjustments for design to fit. From the talent management perspective, human thoughts are characterized by expansion in multiple directions, rather than in one direction, and based on the concept that there are multiple starting points from which one can apply logic to design or problem-solving scenario. Thus, it’s important to embrace different approaches, different opinions, different background, and different skill sets in order to run a “design for fit” IT.

Design to change: The organizational design should be tuned to enforce changeability, innovation, and flexibility. The term “Change Fit” can be interpreted with a degree of variability. A digital organization is a complex social system starting to appreciate attributes such as 'readiness,’ 'ownership,' ‘integration,’ 'open communication,’ customized structuring as well as developing partnerships. Fundamentally, change is about solving problems for leading to progression. Successful organizations see changes coming, with pre-planning and strategy implementation, leverage design thinking to make change delightful and solve real problems radically. It is also important to try to find ways to make people feel involved in the design and implementation of changes. When people are comfortable with the changes by shaping dynamic digital thinking, building robust business processes, and leveraging highly powerful and convenient digital technologies, and change mechanism is embedded into every aspect of the businesses, the digital transformation will happen naturally.

Design to adapt: With rapid changes and continuous disruptions, self-adaptive capabilities or functionalities are generally the requirements within business eco-systems to accelerate the digital speed and develop the organizational competencies. The organization has become "unconscious" if it is no longer responding to the external environment. How successfully the organization can handle digital disruptions depends on how fast and capable they can leverage the right information to make effective decisions for adapting to the “VUCA” digital new normal timely. All are based on the continuous exchange of information with the environment. The aim of modern information management has often been described as getting the right information to the right person in the right format and medium at the right time in order to decide effectively and adapt promptly. IT department is not a silo by itself and it draws its energy from the entire company. Structure and behavior are two elements co-working in every organism in nature and in every system designed by human culture. It is possible to see what enables a self-adaptive organism is an information-driven process feeding and sustaining it, design to adapt. Before you could reinvent a new IT structure, you have to make sure that it’s not just in alignment with the organizational "culture," but also, helps to cultivate the culture of learning and innovation, as that plays a critical role in how you leverage design factors to restructure your department, design products or services, and set underlying principles and rules for reinventing IT to get digital ready.

Due to the changing nature of technology, the IT organization has to continue to re-imagine and reshuffle itself for adapting to changes; leverage design thinking to reinvent itself for getting digital ready. There is no one size fits all formula to moving up from functioning to delight, different IT organizations and enterprises as a whole are at different stages of business maturity. The payoff of IT digital transformation is not just for the quick win, but to build the long-term business competency.

Posted in: IT Innovation,IT Transformation