Running IT as a Busines Partner with Transparency

When all departments truly collaborate with IT to improve the organizational vision, transparency, realization of leveraging IT as a competitive advantage versus just commodity, everybody wins.

Nowadays, IT needs to work both in the business and on the business. IT transformation means rationalizing current IT department and planning to partner with the business to provide tailored services and solutions in new ways. The CIO's leadership penetration is about the depth of IT expertise and the breadth of enterprise and knowledge upon understanding business as a whole. IT leaders need to take the bold move in pursuing strategic engagement with the business and running IT as the business partner with transparency.

Transparency is critical to developing a trustful relationship between the business and IT: Nowadays, information and technology become the creative disrupter to business growth and industry evolution, IT is no longer just an enabler of the business strategy, it becomes an integral part of the strategy. Thus, IT leaders must increase and demonstrate their level of understanding of their organization's business model and strategy, proactively contribute to strategy-making. This will lead to greater respect and trust from the business leaders. To truly build the premium level of IT-business relationship, IT leaders have to reach out horizontally to their business peers. IT, marketing, finance, HR., etc all have its own subsection of the overall business strategy. To keep IT and business on the same page, IT leaders should listen to a wide range of feedback from business users, question the business’s requirement and justifications of IT-based business initiatives, offer customers a set of choices, and take the premium solution to solve their problems. IT is the only entity in the organization supposed to understand the business entirely and oversee organizational processes horizontally. Organizational transparency will enable effective communication, build trust, enforce collaboration, manage change smoothly and integrate the loosely coupled functions into integrated business competency with IT as the linchpin.

Engage at the right level and about the right things to improve organizational competency: To keep IT relevant, IT has to move from a back-office support function hidden in the corner to become a highly visible facilitator, enabler, integrator, optimizer, and orchestrator of the digital business. IT leaders and professionals need to leverage the right information, engage at the right level and about the right things to improve organizational transparency. That means it’s simply not sufficient for IT to take orders from the business only. It’s invaluable for both IT and business to know what’s going on in each other’s space and why by enforcing cross-functional communication and strategic partnership. Business competency underpins strategy execution. The transparent strategic mapping allows people at a different level of the organizational hierarchy understanding business goals and objectives, grasping customers and what they value, then identify how to best characterize the business value through portfolio management, define the suitable measurement to properly assess business performance from outside-in business’s perspective.

Keep IT cost transparent and all IT spending should be rationalized against the business benefits: IT is always striving to improve its value to the business, also means to cut out waste and fully integrated into the business. In reality, many organizations have very little insight into their cost structures and who is consuming the assets. They have no idea where they are spending their money on; or they spend the significant portion of their budget and resources on “keeping the lights on,” leave too little for doing innovation and improving the top line business growth. Therefore, it’s important to keep IT cost transparent, and clarify some important IT value concerns such as: What is the real tangible or measurable business value? Who is driving or measuring perceived business value? Are all IT spending rationalized against the business benefit? IT needs to promote its products and market its capabilities via transparency and cultural willingness to optimize IT spending.

When all departments truly collaborate with IT to improve the organizational vision, transparency, realization of leveraging IT as a competitive advantage versus just commodity, everybody wins. IT leaders have to continuously improve, develop, and change everything in a prioritized order as long as it creates a more long-term business advantage.

Posted in: IT Transformation