Running logical IT with all critical flows enable the business moving up to the advanced stage of digital deployment and yield strategic advantage.
IT is an engineering discipline, as always, but adding more enriched digital context for the paradigm shift. IT can be used as a tool, an enabler, a catalyst, and a digital platform to orchestrate change and facilitate idea creation and implementation, to meet the ultimate goal of an organization's short, medium, and long-term strategic goals. It’s important to take a structural approach to run logical IT by evolving five-step digital flow.
Situation - requirements, expectations, capabilities, trends: Every IT project should be business initiative for meeting customers’ expectations. IT management needs to leverage “SWOT” or other analysis tools for making an objective assessment of the IT organizational strength and weakness, opportunities and threats, as well as trend. Look at what's happening now and what's coming down the pike so they can be proactive in preparing for it. It really forces businesses to do an environmental scan, pay attention to how things are changing and then think about what they might need to change to respond to the trends.
When it comes to collect business requirements, IT has to keep track of where the requirements come from. IT requirements need to functionally structured to serve the enterprise needs, and it often requires cross-functional teams working collaboratively to produce the overall functionality and required capability. IT has to oversee the full set of requirements to ensure the cohesiveness and obtain the involvement from customers, users and stakeholders.
Strategy - value proposition, business model, implementation plan: IT strategy is an integral component of the organizational strategy. Having an information-based strategy requires people to think really ahead. IT needs to deliver value to the organization in order to help the business build differentiated competency and implement business strategy. IT value is multifaceted and it’s interesting to see how IT value is in the eye of the beholder, and provides context for varying interest and need.
IT value-based strategy management needs to be driven by concepts such as collaborative value or collective advantage and multi-layer ROIs. IT can expect some sort of partnership with the business, where you have business folks coming up with further ideas on how they can benefit from IT. IT should play a proactive role in proposing, as opposed to responding to changes and reinvent IT for getting digital ready. With information abundance and lightweight digital technologies, IT also plays a critical role in recharging business models and lifting the organization up to the next stage of the business development cycle.
Deployment - systems, processes, tasks, knowledge, review: Information Technology system is the backbone of the digital organization. The “T” (technology or a computer system) part of IT is an enabling system for an “I” driven - Information System (IS). Real information systems are business oriented, to integrate different pieces of IT components into a holistic system for accomplishing strategic business goals and objectives.
Often, the bad systems are possibly caused by complicated processes or inflexible procedures or silo functions. It’s important to take a structural approach to improve IT processes and systems by reducing the waste and burden, to understand that a system is a necessary precondition for effective intervention. The best way IT can demonstrate value to the business is to invest in understanding the business processes it supports, streamline workloads, accomplish tasks, manage knowledge, and deliver improvements that help the business achieve its strategic goals and objectives. An effective IT system is dynamic, robust, and antifragile, to keep businesses flow and ensure the system as a whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Performance - customer experience, effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, compliance: IT performance measurement helps IT management continue to review upon ROIs of existing IT investment and improve overall IT management effectiveness and efficiency. IT performance indicators should show a clear link to C-level executives between IT performance and top-line business revenue generation. The measurable IT performance allows wider business audience knowing IT value-proposition and improves IT department visibility.
IT leaders nowadays have to be prepared to constantly realign technology against the enterprise's business needs and measure things really matter to the business's success, such as IT productivity, effectiveness, efficiency, customer experience, etc. To refine IT reputation, "measuring up" is intriguing but it is crucial for IT to be perceived as a strategic business partner and relentless “digital transformer.”
IT organizations have come a long way from being purely technical specialists to being critical strategic partners for leading business growth and transformation. Running a logical IT with all critical flows enable the business moving up to the advanced stage of digital deployment and yield strategic advantage.
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