The New Book “100 IT Charms” Chapter VII Competitive IT ~ Future of CIO

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

The New Book “100 IT Charms” Chapter VII Competitive IT

10:51 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Leveraging unique IT knowledge and capabilities to build business competency is crucial for the business’s long-term growth and maturity.

The unprecedented opportunities brought by digital information technologies and increasing speed of changes can lit up a fast-growing business promptly. Keeping IT dynamic is critical for adapting to unforeseen urgent changes in the business. The CIO must run a modern IT organization with a set of core competencies in order to build the trustful business-IT relationship and become a strategic business partner.

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High-caliber IT organization: IT is the value-added delivery that makes the organization different and competitive. Information & Technology is, in fact, the threshold to knit all important business elements into cohesive business competency. IT can enforce the business benefit by mixing the diverse business ingredients to create products, services or processes which generate differentiated business value and boost the long term organizational growth. IT can drive digital transformation, the high caliber IT organizations are at an inflection point to orchestrate critical business processes, tools, and products that organizations can use to drive digital transformation from strategy to deployment. The IT empowered and insight-driven digital transformation can create synchronization of all business functions running seamlessly to achieve the higher purpose and reach the next level of business maturity.

Hybrid IT organization: In order to make a solid digital transformation, there are many seemly paradoxical but in fact, coherent elements in running a highly effective IT organization. IT should combine the old way to do things and the new way to explore, the best and next practices, take the balance of traditional hierarchy and flatter structure. Being hybrid means o take “balance” as a management philosophy. Balance is important in regards to making a strategic decision that delivers the real sustainable competitive advantage. The latest digital computing technologies enable seamless virtual platforms, enhance physical organizational structures, empower workforce brainstorming by sharing thoughts and ideas, engaging customers and partners to voice concerns and feedback and encouraging the broader conversations and interactions within the business ecosystem, and developing a hybrid organizational structure to enhance cross-functional communication and collaboration. The hybrid IT capabilities work best to fit most organizations, strike the right balance of change and stability with the goal to run a highly effective and high-innovative IT organization.

Niche Player IT: Digital provides significant opportunities for business growth and innovation, IT plays a significant role in digital transformation. Running a niche player IT means you need to build a set of core capabilities which underpin strategy implementation and bring differentiated business advantages. Running a niche player IT also means customer-centricity. From a customer perspective, if the business is not different, you are a commodity either for IT or the business as a whole. Assuming the company has a great product, creating relevant, meaningful and compelling differentiation in the mind of the customer is the challenge. But it’s the foundation in which brands are built. A niche player IT also focuses on achieving business intelligence, building the value proposition, and improving organizational maturity. A niche player IT is not a business guru, but the glue to integrate, innovate, optimize and modernize the company and make the business highly responsive to the increasing speed of changes.

Leveraging unique IT knowledge and capabilities to build business competency is crucial for the business’s long-term growth and maturity. It requires IT leaders to think long term and better ways to do things. Running niche IT with unique competencies makes the business shining even on the raining day, differentiate your organization from competitors to reach the next level of IT management maturity.