Setting High Standard to Run High Mature Digital IT Organization

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. 

Organizations across the industrial sectors are relying more on information technology, IT organization has more to overcome. It’s simply not sufficient to run IT as a support function only. IT can provide the business ability to explore new business models by knitting all important components seamlessly or delight customers by providing them digital options. IT organizations can bring up business benefit by mixing diverse business elements to create great products, services, or processes which generate differentiated value for the long-term growth of the business. It’s time to set a high standard to run high mature digital IT organization.


It’s the breadth of vision: Nowadays, technology is often the disruptive force behind digital transformation and information can be refined into business foresight and customer insight. It’s the breadth of vision differentiates a great CIO from an average CIO. Reimagining the future of digital business is exciting. IT can become the driving force for business growth. It takes visionary leadership to create a blue ocean for providing a competitive advantage. To lead effectively and become value-added, IT leaders should learn the business, set high standard, grasp opportunities to participate varying digital dialogs and get their voice heard, and implement strategic goals to achieve high-performance results. IT needs to permeating into the business functions and ecosystem, and invite customers and partners to provide feedback for improving their products or services. An aggressive IT organization can explore new ways to create business value aggressively by leveraging emerging trends and applying lightweight digital technologies. Strategic CIOs are proactive, energetic, engaged, decisive, seek to engage others, and have IT and business collaborate as equal partners so that strategies, people, processes, technologies, etc, work in harmony to accelerate performance.

It’s about catalyzing innovation: Traditional IT organizations act as the controller to avoid risk. But risk is part of innovation. Innovation is the only path to create long term business advantage. It is important to make sure that the management is forward-thinkingl enough for “doing more with innovation. IT leaders understand that technology-led innovation is not only for figuring out a better way to run the business today but also building business competency for the long run. They should set a high standard and take the step-wise approach to leading changes, catalyzing innovation, and driving digital transformation. The science of innovation is to manage innovation lifecycle and executes it in a systematic manner that provides sustained competitive advantage. IT leaders should apply the outside-in business lens to innovate at the organizational level and across the entire business ecosystem. IT plays a significant role in adding all critical pieces which are needed for accelerating validation of facts about business ideas, definition, benefits and shortcomings, applications, and competing technologies. IT can also help to fine-tune light-weight processes which allow creativity flow, channeled and nurtured so that innovation will succeed more often than those organizations do not have such processes and capacities.

It’s for continuously delivering high performance business results: Setting high standard is also about following the progress principle to keep improving IT performance and maturity. Or put simply, make continuous improvement more than discover an elegant solution. IT maturity is not based on how many years IT organizations have been around and keep running to support the business; but about how well IT can provide innovative solutions to reach higher-than-expected business results and delight customers.  IT-driven digital transformation is the journey of continuous delivery and improvement. Great IT leaders have to be prepared to constantly realign technology against the enterprise's business needs and measure things really matter to the business's success in the long run. The high mature digital CIOs are not only passionate digital visionaries but also cool-headed business executives who can play the number game wisely by managing budgets, setting measurement and achieving high performance business results consistently. The business benefit can be measurable in dollars, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, quality, etc.

Driving business growth and leading evolutionary change are the never-ending journey. 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. The forward-thinking organizations have to set high standards, empower IT to take charge and take a structural approach in building organizational level changeability for thriving in the “VUCA” digital new normal and bringing up substantial business benefits.

Posted in: CIO Master,IT Transformation,Principle/Practice