The New Book “100 IT Charms” New Book Introduction Chapter VIII: IT a Problem-Solving Master ~ Future of CIO

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

The New Book “100 IT Charms” New Book Introduction Chapter VIII: IT a Problem-Solving Master

11:21 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

IT needs to be influential enough to impact and provide customers with the right solutions in the right manner at the right cost.

With overcomplex business normality and continuous disruptions, the role of IT in the current business environment should be able to solve critical business problems and enable business outcomes. The digital CIO as the business solutionist should ask themselves and others how IT-enabled business solutions will contribute to the achievement of the company’s objectives and business benefits. They actually need to work closely with the business to identify and frame the real problems, not just symptoms, as well as how to leverage information and technology to solve them effectively and efficiently.

Slideshare Presentation

Solution-driven IT: Most IT organizations are still overloaded and understaffed and get stuck at a lower level of business maturity. CIOs need to assign their resource and time carefully and solve problems really matter. They don’t set up priorities in a vacuum. Rather, they will leverage the enterprise’s strategy and business objectives to determine which problems are critical to solving and which competencies they need to build for becoming a great problem-solver of their company. IT is in a unique position to oversee organizational functions and structures; it needs to have knowledge and skills for interpreting important business issues into technology-enabled solutions and leverage necessary resources to solve them systematically. The pitfall is that many IT specialists do not have enough knowledge of lack an in-depth understanding of their businesses or customers; very few know their business’s strategy and can’t map their daily tasks to the business’s strategic goal. Sometimes, instead of solving problems, they perhaps add unnecessary complexity to the already tangled process or create new problems. To become an insightful problem-solver, it is important for IT to interact with the business in their processes and pain areas and bring out customer-tailored and technology-driven solutions to truly eliminate real problems, not just fix symptoms.

Information Management solutionary: Information is growing exponentially and it’s one of the most invaluable business assets of modern organizations. Information potential directly impacts the growth potential of the organization. IT is a solutionary for information management to effectively manage the information life cycle and ensure the right people getting the right information timely to make the right decisions. IT plays a crucial role in managing information to refine business insight for either solving problems or capturing business growth opportunities. Managing information is a tough course which often does not show up on the bottom line or immediately drives the top line business growth. But it helps the business thrive for the long run. In fact, in today’s digital business ecosystem, Information Management is a key differentiator between digital leaders and laggard, high-performing organizations and mediocre companies. The effective and productive information management scenarios should understand and deal with the complexity of management, know how to prioritize based on the business needs to solve critical issues, communicate extensively, and delivery visible business benefits.

IT as innovative problem-solver: The real problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually discovering the best solution to that problem, not just the band-aid approach or getting stuck at “we always do things like that” mentality. Thinking creatively about a problem requires being close to the problem and understanding the context and intangible variables. IT has to walk the talk, be open to diverse opinions and feedbacks and strives to provide innovative solutions for meeting the business’s requirement, offer value-added features based on systematic understanding and customer insight and exceed the expectation of customers. To connect the wider dots, IT leaders and professional should even look to businesses outside their industry to spur “out of the box” thinking and solving problem innovatively. Innovation in business context simply becomes “creating value by solving simple or complex problems” timely. Looking broadly and understanding problems deeply enable IT leaders to provide mindful and pragmatic pieces of advice and invaluable recommendations to the business on how to leverage IT in problem-solving and run IT as an excellent business solutionary.

It’s the age of customers and options. IT needs to be influential enough to impact and provide customers with the right solutions in the right manner at the right cost. The CIO role has never been just about managing the status quo. It’s critical for IT to brainstorm “what’s possible” not just “who do you want” and implement the best solutions to achieve high-performance business results.