The New Book “100 IT Charm” Introduction: Chapter I IT as Business Driver ~ Future of CIO

Wednesday, June 12, 2019

The New Book “100 IT Charm” Introduction: Chapter I IT as Business Driver

11:16 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Building a business-driven digital IT organization means that IT can demonstrate its performance not from IT lens but from outside-in business and customer perspective.

Nowadays information and technology are pervasive in today’s business and our society. It’s important to run a business-driven digital IT organization with the dynamic, integral and interactive digital flow and take the interdisciplinary management practices to transform IT from the back office support function to a strategic business partner.

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Accelerate IT as the digital growth engine: IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behaviors. Forward-looking companies have to empower their IT organizations to drive digital transformation. IT provides a nervous system to the business; business needs IT to provide better quality and real-time information to grasp growth opportunities and improve business profitability. It totally depends on a deep understanding of the business issues and implementing the strategic goals by leveraging IT tools and techniques. The importance of IT to the enterprise will increase due to the depth of their relationships with business users throughout the enterprise and its unique position to oversee processes and structures. Enterprise IT organizations are likely to be winners on the whole if IT starts to plan and accelerate digital transformation, achieve high-performance business results and improve organizational competency.

Run IT as business productivity booster: Information technology management is not for its own sake, but to deliver quality business solutions that drive business growth, improve organizational productivity, reduce cost and accelerate business performance. IT department provides guidance, support, assistance, and direction in the application and adoption of information technology solutions in support of business objectives and improves business productivity. Determining what contribution IT investments make to higher productivity is a little more complex and probably requires some sort of multifactor productivity analysis, data and time, in which the productivity increase can only be attributed to IT, all other things being the same. It’s also important to automate the holistic part of the business to further improve business productivity, performance, and quality.

Develop IT as a reciprocal business partner: Digital organizations are highly connected, responsive and interdependent living things. To apply the Law of Newton: “To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” to IT management. Building a reciprocal digital IT organization is all about enforcing communication, enhancing collaboration, building trust, and bridging gaps. In reality, too often IT sees business professionals wanting to go back to the segmented organization and define technology as something outside of the business as a separate entity. That’s the mindset usually causes constant battles between IT and business. To harmonize business-IT relationship, all executives need to play as true business leaders, not just as functional managers, share the glory and responsibilities altogether, initiate meaningful dialogues to exchange of ideas or opinions on particular issues with a view to reaching an amicable agreement or settlement. IT needs to innovate towards simplicity and discover new secure ways to allow users to do things that have not been allowed in the past, listen to customers’ feedback and involve them in driving customer-centric innovation. People, process, and technology are all part of the business body, only through coordination or corporation, the full business potential can be unleashed.

Building a business-driven digital IT organization means that IT can demonstrate its performance not from IT lens but from outside-in business and customer perspective. The priority for CIOs is to genuinely position IT as an integral and inseparable part of the business, define core IT competencies and refine IT reputation as the strategic business partner.