Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Charting Digital Paradigm Shift by Exploring Rationale, Intuitive, and Strategic Side of IT

IT-driven digital transformation is the journey of continuous delivery and improvement, with the uprising opportunities to breakthrough and game-changing.

Information Technology is permeating into every corner of the organization. IT organization is in the middle of a sea change. It is important to realize that there are basic principles and rules that make it work and there are different styles of mentality and methodology to run IT today. Practices and actions depend on the organizational maturity, competition, and customer expectations, High-mature digital organizations always look for opportunities across the business ecosystem to increase the usage of abundant information and emergent digital technologies, explore the rationale, intuitive, and strategic side of IT accordingly, and chart digital paradigm shift seamlessly.

The rational side of IT: IT as an engineering discipline is by nature scientific and logical. Business logic is a blanket term that covers several very different types of components such as business rules, workflows, algorithms, and integration logic. The rational side of IT should enforce business logic and work on improving process efficiency and cost optimization. Logically, the role of IT in the current dynamic business environment should  enable business outcomes and catalyze organizational growth. The logic focus is great for the CIO to ensure IT operational excellence and digital fluency. From finance perspective, budget planning, priority change, resource reallocation, and technology diversions, etc, will force IT management to become more rational and logical. But running a rationale IT organization doesn’t mean IT is mechanical and reactive and acts as an order taker only. In fact, CIOs should always stay focused on the big picture of the company, take calculated risks to run a healthy application portfolio, and to ensure that IT is on the right track to achieve well-defined business goals without getting lost and burning out. IT organization should follow the logical scenario to walk through different stages such as assessment, improvement and measurement, etc, to ensure running high-performing, high-reliable, and high-proactive IT as the key success factor of business transformation.

The intuitive side of IT: There are two sides of IT. The back side of IT is perhaps complex, but the front side of IT facing customers should be intuitive and easy to use, deliver customer tailored solutions to achieve specified goals and optimize customer experiences in a continuous delivery mode. IT is getting more frequently involved in building products for either internal or external customers, but unfortunately, creating great user experiences continues to be a struggle. An intuitive IT-enabled business solution should meet the customer’s criteria such as, what the users need it to do, the way they want to do it, quickly enough, accurately enough, and easy to use, etc. Today’s IT leaders and professionals are not just engineering nerds or computer geeks, but artistic technologists with intuition and creative intelligence. Intuition should be taken as a new insight, a new idea, a new angle, but must be backed with sound reasoning in the end before putting it into action. Collectively, it’s the teamwork to create intuitive products and services that are exciting to customers and profitable to businesses.

The strategic side of IT: Nowadays IT is the business and IT management has a broadened scope and oversees the entire company. It often needs to work on or across the system, not just in the system to weave digital hyper-connectivity and differentiated business competency through the entire business ecosystem. In fact, IT is a strategic business advantage. Transforming IT from a cost center to a strategic business partner requires more than logical thinking, it takes innovative leadership and the ability to think outside the usual box and create a blue ocean for providing a competitive advantage to the organization. Strategic CIOs are proactive, energetic, engaged, seek to engage others, and have IT and business collaborate as equal partners so that strategies, people, processes, technologies, etc, work in harmony to achieve higher than expected business performance.To enforce IT leadership role, CIOs should be a mentor and strategic partner for business executives, clarify the impact of information & technology, interpret the IT role in the strategic transformations of the company to ensure the executive and management teams are on the same page to move forward in the right direction.

By blending logic and intuition properly, IT can be used as a tool, enabler, catalyzer, and a digital platform to orchestrate change and become the strategic business differentiator. IT needs to continuously try to improve, develop, and change everything in a prioritized order as long as it creates a more long-term business advantage. IT-driven digital transformation is the journey of continuous delivery and improvement, with the uprising opportunities to breakthrough and game-changing.

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