Three “Soaring Factors” to Accelerate IT Transformation

 Take the strenuous effort on IT management effectiveness and maturity by leveraging these soaring factors to make digital IT more adaptive, energetic, and innovative.

With the fast pace of changes and exponential growth of information, IT becomes the building blocks of business competency and the key success factors of long-term business success. Regardless of which industry or the nature of the organization you are in, IT leaders need to get really creative on how they can create unique business value from piles of the abundance of information and commoditized technology; and how they can leverage those soaring factors to accelerate IT transformation?



Focus: Great opportunities, hidden risks, and continuous disruptions are around every corner. Nowadays, there are so many plates that enterprise IT needs to spin and keep balanced. The focus becomes an important factor to run a successful IT organization. But what exactly do IT leaders need to focus on? IT needs to become a strategic business partner by focusing on things that really matter for the business’s long-term perspective; working closely with customers to solve their critical issues; focusing on the information aspect of the role in the context of the business to unlock business performance; focuses on building core business capabilities to catalyze growth and improve overall business competency, as well as focus on sustaining IT operations which is fundamental, but critical. On one side, make sure IT-enabled business systems run according to plans and performance; also keep an eye on the horizon - look for opportunities by assessing new technologies and mining information, determine viability and align with the strategic direction of the company. This can only be achieved through constantly engaging with business and customers, collecting their feedback, and ensuring all evolving parties staying at the same page to accelerate business transformation. When IT goes disoriented, gets distracted, loses focus, it perhaps turns out to be “good at nothing,” and become irrelevant soon.

Choice: From an IT management perspective, the choice is the basis for strategic positioning. Making strategic choice is not only about deciding what you are going to do but also about what you definitely are not going to do. IT leaders can only make the right choice and speed up change if they have reliable information to them and gain an in-depth understanding of the business and circumstances. Technology is the means to end, running proactive IT requires participation by the entire company. As requirements are gathered, managed, and discussed with executives and teams, IT has to oversee the full set of the requirements to ensure cohesiveness and to obtain the involvement of all related customers, users, and stakeholders. Tactically, IT can provide choices for businesses about communication content, the methodology they want, and use their language; provide choices for users and customers on how to solve their issues from their lens and provide the best-fit solutions to their problems; provide choices for talented IT employees on how they would like to get the work done, stop micromanagement and foster autonomy. Overall speaking, corporate IT has no choice but to embrace and accelerate transformational change or literally face extinction.

Shift: We are experiencing the major digital paradigm shift, IT organizations are shifting from being a monolithic back office support function to the mosaic business change catalyzer; IT management is shifting from controlling to enabling to innovating, and IT maturity is also shifting from being the pure technical specialist to being the trustful strategic partner and from surviving to striving to thriving mode. IT is also shifting from being a builder to an integrator and information broker. With the increasing speed of changes, the highly effective digital organization has a higher level of responsiveness and performance. IT can speed up and shorten the products or services delivery cycle by integrating multiple and different specialized commercial software components into customer-tailored solutions, not building from scratch. IT is shifting from technology focused to information-driven, manage frictionless information flow to ensure the right people can access the right information at the right time to make right decisions timely, bring better results and run a dynamic digital organization. The CIO's role is also in a major shift, from a tactical manager and a strategy implementer to a strategic business leader, or at least with the influential power to shape and keep in harmony with the business, market, products, and resources.

IT is not just technical, but rather business-driven. Take the strenuous effort on IT management effectiveness and maturity by leveraging these soaring factors to make digital IT more adaptive, energetic, integrated, flexible, versatile, nimble, reliable, and fast, with the goal to achieve the optimized performance and accelerate digital transformation.

Posted in: Digital Master,IT Transformation