The New Book “100 IT Charms” Book Introduction Chapter VI People-Centric IT organization ~ Future of CIO

Monday, June 17, 2019

The New Book “100 IT Charms” Book Introduction Chapter VI People-Centric IT organization

10:40 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Digital is the age of people and options. It provides abundant opportunities to rethink how to do things and run a people-centric business.

Traditional IT organizations are often operation-driven, inside-out and monolithic, but the digital era upon us is about people. IT needs to be run as a people-centric organization to enchant customers, empower employees, evolve business partners, and ensure the right people at the right positions to get the right information at the right time to make right decisions. IT should take preponderate importance in the coming year to make sustainable IT-business relationship and build a people-centric digital organization.

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Outside-in IT: IT faces unprecedented opportunities to refine its reputation, also needs to take more responsibilities as a trustful business partner. CIOs need to take the “outside-in” business and customers’ perspective, get the transformation agenda right and have access to both external and internal resources to achieve the desired ROI. What’s missing in many organizations though is the CIO’s ability to question the business’s requirements and justifications used for IT-based business initiatives. One of the mistakes that IT even makes is to run IT project as a purely technical challenge without “keeping the end in mind” - the ultimate customer needs and business goals. In practice, running an outside-in IT starts from mind shift of the IT leaders, IT leaders are business strategists, not just transactional managers. CIOs really need to evaluate important issues, do the due diligence, ask good questions and pick the right software and hardware that can do the work, help IT become seamlessly integrated with the business and be aware of the organization as a whole to achieve high-performance business results.

Communication competent IT: With information permeation and often technology-led disruptions, it’s simply not sufficient to just run IT as an isolated function to keep the lights on only. IT leaders need to think like the anthropologist for running a people-centric organization to enchant customers, engage employees and evolve business partners. It’s critical for CIOs to be the great communicators, have both business acumen and IT knowledge to ensure IT acting as an integral part of the business. There are multilayer relationships CIOs need to manage. IT leaders should target different audiences such as business peers or shareholders relationship, customer relationship, vendor relationship, etc, tailor their special needs in order to build up the empathic leadership competency. IT leaders need to inspire and exemplify changes by mastering audience tailored communication, initiating conversations at the different level of the organization with clarity and empathy in order to drive change proactively. To close perception and communication gaps, IT leaders should practice strategic communication to share a clear vision, creative communication to touch the hearts & mind, and cross-functional communication to foster innovation, to rebrand IT as a communication-competent, creative, and trustful business partner.

Customer-driven IT: IT now becomes an integral and crucial element of business competencies for digitizing every touch point of customer experience and building a customer-centric organization. When IT can really understand or attempt to capture the insight about what customers actually want, it is when you can really develop an experience that fits them and their needs or desires. It’s important to capture customer insight, not just get information and understand it partially in order to run a people-centric organization. A valid strategic objective mapping allows you to first understand your customers and what they value, and define key indicators to measure the business result accordingly. Customer-facing applications are critical as at the end of the day, they generate revenue for the business. Delivering customer-facing application is strategic to delight customers with new solutions and build up the high-performance team with the best and the next practices to run IT as a customer champion

Digital is the age of people and options. It provides abundant opportunities to rethink how to do things and run a people-centric business. It forces IT management to get really creative on how they architect and implement changes to ensure IT is strategically positioned to be ahead of where the business is moving next; while at the same time, be people-centric, engage employees and delight customers, to reach the next stage of business performance and organizational maturity.