The New Book “100 IT Charm” Introduction: Chapter III Strategic IT ~ Future of CIO

Friday, June 14, 2019

The New Book “100 IT Charm” Introduction: Chapter III Strategic IT

10:40 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

The future of IT is more about the intangible information fabric with emerging digital technologies interwoven into the entire company for building a strategic business advantage.

Digital transformation implies the full-scale changes in the way that the business is conducted. Thus, simply adopting new digital technology is not sufficient. There is a fundamental shift happening with the emergence of the converging technologies that impact the business through cross-departmental communication and collaboration. Therefore, it’s important to run IT as the strategic business partner to drive change and catalyze digital transformation.

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IT as the strategic enabler: Many IT organizations are at the crossroad, either continue to be a commoditized IT service provider or reinvent itself to become the growth engine of the business. IT has to be an integral part of the company for driving business value. The first step of IT transformation is about forging close relationships with senior executives and business managers to really understand their goals and plans for expanding the business. Having IT and business collaborate as equal partners so that strategies, people, processes, technologies, etc, work in harmony to ensure that business initiatives, especially those focused on leveraging IT to increase revenues, are on the right track to achieve the higher-than-expected business results. This is extremely important in today’s business dynamic in which the global business environment, organizations, and technology are continuing to experience dramatic changes at an accelerated pace. IT leaders need to do a better job of articulating the existing and potential value of IT to the business quantitatively in a language and measurement that senior executives understand.

Future-driven IT: Nowadays IT is the business and IT management has a broadened scope; it often needs to work on or across the system, not just in the system to weave digital hyperconnectivity and differentiated business competency through the entire business ecosystem. IT is no longer just the tangible hardware boxes which are heading into the commodity. The future of IT is more about the intangible information fabric with emerging digital technologies interwoven into the entire company. The future-driven IT organizations can step out of the traditional IT box to understand the business and customers better via a longer time frame and broader perspectives. IT needs to build up the new set of core competencies in transforming itself and the business as a whole. The future-driven IT should continually fine-tune a successful structure to improve people-centricity, engage and align employees’ talent with the strategic goal of the business and shape digital IT workforce which is flexible and innovative for accelerating business performance and maximize the digital potential. CIOs need to be the transformational leader who can advocate for their organization, bridge gaps, shape the culture of learning and innovation and build the momentum for a non-stoppable digital paradigm shift.

Design-led digital IT: IT plays a pivotal role in orchestrating the digital transformation of the business. Design thinking is a unique path of pursuing innovation. The strategic objective of design thinking can fundamentally change organizations, build a strong brand, and improve customer satisfaction. IT is getting involved in building products for either internal or external customers, but unfortunately, creating great user experiences continues to be a struggle. It is the teamwork to create innovative and delightful products or services that are profitable to your business while being exciting to the users. It’s critical to embrace design-centered development when you have a very competitive environment around functionality. From an IT management perspective, the methodologies being put into design thinking bucket are somewhat unique and previously outside of the business normal, but have great potential to run customer-centric IT organization. In fact, the design does need more recognition as a thinking and problem-solving process. Further, more and more of work are less about design in its purity and more focused on holistic and strategic design-led business initiatives which most fit to achieve the strategic business goals, engage employees and delight customers to reap the business benefit for the long term.

Today, IT is a competitive advantage for many successful companies across vertical sectors. Digital IT needs to become the strategic business partner and CIOs should be clear on what needs to achieve in terms of the top line, bottom line and work in tandem to achieve the high-performance business result and drive digital transformation seamlessly.