Three “X” Factors of Running Digital IT Organization

IT organizations have come a long way from being pure technical specialists to being critical strategic partners or digital designer to catalyze business growth. 

Digital means the increasing pace of changes, fierce competitions, and continuous disruptions. The IT ability to change and speed of changes can make or break the company’s digital transformation. Thus, IT should be integral to and knowledgeable of the business, aligned with enterprise objectives, as an enabler, a facilitator, and a digital conductor. The multidimensional digital effects provide impressive advantages in term of the business speed, customer insight, business foresight, and the quality of products and services. Here are three “X” factors to run a digital ready IT organization.

Synchronization: In the digital era with “VUCA” characteristics, timing is everything. Digital synchronization occurs on multiple levels, but it presupposes the ability of each 'link' to articulate the 'strategic intent and improve the overall business responsiveness and performance.' The goal to run a high-responsive and high-performance digital IT organization is to create business synergy and achieve digital synchronization of the entire business. In many companies, even IT has evolved significantly in running the business today, business, often continues to evolve faster in grasping the market share and winning new customers, but often failed, due to lack of the real-time information. Thus, real-time information is important for responding to changes and making effective decisions. Information synchronization is the process of establishing consistency among data from a source to the target storage and vice versa, make continuous harmonization and refinement of the information to capture invaluable business insight. With these insights, organizations acquire the ability to reshape products, services, and customer engagement. In practice, modern information management is not just about finding a way to replace the old information management system; it’s about looking for an integrated enterprise level solution that cleanses and combines information from multiple sources, supports the secure sharing of information, presents them in an "end user-friendly" format; getting insight into the right user in a way that supports an effective decision management cycle. If organizations are truly being digitized underneath, at the process level to gain real-time insight, the insight-driven digital transformation can further generate synchronization of all functions running seamlessly.

Personalization: Digital is the era of people, option, empathy, or simply put, "personalization." Business users and consumers are selective nowadays due to the unprecedented convenience brought by digital technologies. Compared to static and mechanic industrial organizations decades ago, the digital organization is more like the living system with its unique identity, in part because ways of doing business and customer expectations both tend to be more flexible than the siloed industrial age. Customers are at the center of a digital organization, being customer-centric is the ultimate goal for any forward-looking business today. Providing personalized services or solutions to its customers become the new normal to run a customer-centric organization. It forces  IT leaders to get really creative on how they orchestrate and implement changes and engaging customers by providing simplified and intuitive products or services on an ongoing basis, deploy a range of technologies that focus on improving the customer's experience. If you are doing so to a greater extent than your competitors, you are gaining competitive business advantages for the long term.

Differentiation: Organizations are different, they have different cultures, different structures, they compete in different markets, they have a different scale. IT is increasingly supportive of the competitive position and the business. Technology is a differentiator and creative disruptor, and the information is the most time-intensive piece of digital innovation. The business expects IT to become new capability enablers at highly innovative organizations that compete on product/service differentiation. In fact, the differentiation provided by innovative technologies usually is more long-lived than differentiation provided by marketing actions that can be copied easier. The role of digital IT is to identify and blend the ways that information and technology can assist and shape the business by linking all digital aspects such as goals, objectives, actions, etc, together to enforce the business competency; these are then mixed with other ingredients to create differentiative products and process which generate distinguished business competencies. The foundation in which the business brands are built is how customers have impressions on their experiences of your great products or services which can create meaningful, relevant and compelling differentiation in their mind or touch their heart amazingly.

IT organizations have come a long way from being pure technical specialists to being critical strategic partners or digital designer to catalyze business growth and drive digital transformation. The highly innovative and high mature IT organizations can create these x-factors deliberately, work at the heart of the enterprise, build a competitive business advantage, lead organizational level changes and make a leap of digital transformation.

Posted in: Digital Maturity,IT Innovation,IT Transformation