Champion the intuitive and ‘Easy to Use” IT Enabled Business Solutions

 IT management can fluently mix the art and science in trying new technologies, innovate the products or services and delight customers via intuitive interfaces and “easy to use” features.

Running digital IT means doing more with innovation, transparency, and discipline. The balance of art and science in IT is how to enforce scientific discipline and enhance artistic touch, make continuous efforts on developing intuitive products or services to delight customers and improving IT maturity.

A real customer-centric approach permeates into everything about the way the CIO leads in the business: Today’s IT leaders and professionals are not just engineering nerds or computer geeks, but specialized generalists, artistic technologists or scientific artists who can champion intuitive IT-enabled business solutions meeting the customers’ criteria and clarify their concerns 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. This requires a cross-functional customer-centric paradigm for managing and operating IT/technology and deliver intuitive business solutions.

To make IT a digital catalyst and innovation engine of the business, IT management can fluently mix the art and science in trying new technologies, innovate the products or services and delight customers via intuitive interfaces and “easy to use” features. IT leaders should break down silo mentality, see beyond the confines of his or her own function by understanding all the moving parts of the company, get a feeler of the holistic business view, and contribute to the overall improvement of the greater company,

Champion the intuitive solutions to delighting customers as an important dimension to innovate IT: IT is getting more frequently involved in building products or services for either internal or external customers, but unfortunately, creating great user experiences continues to be a struggle for the majority of IT organizations. Thus, IT management needs to collect feedback from customers: How is the end-user going to use your solution? Does the new solution help users do things better than the current solution or the user all together have to change the way he/she performs his/her tasks by using this new system? Etc.

The highly innovative organizations depend more heavily on their technological knowledge and market capabilities to develop and commercialize innovation. The best way for IT/technology to help win customers’ hearts is to make the most of IT/technology "invisible" to the customer for enforcing "Intuition + Evidence-Based" design. Hide the complexity of IT/technology, what left visible to the customer should be simple, intuitive, secure, reliable and predictable and easy to use interface. To adapt to rapid changes and demanding customers, there are more and more IT-driven business solutions integrating multiple and different specialized commercial software components into customer-tailored solutions with speed.

The digital IT paints an excellent picture of the business interaction and independence of the expanded digital ecosystem: Running highly responsive IT needs to get support from front desks to boardrooms because it might need to work cross boxes instead within the box to foster cross-functional interactions and collaborations. CIOs should understand every aspect of the business and connect all effective dots between IT and business as well as across the digital ecosystem for running IT as a business.

The "strategic" part of this digital transformation planning process is the continual attention to current changes in the organization and its external environment, and how this affects the future of the organization. IT leaders need to break down the IT thinking box, go out and talk with varying shareholders, and clarify innovation management goals from outside in business perspectives. They should chat with business executives and customers to know their pains and gains and understand their tastes as well as current and future needs for sparking innovative ideas and championing intuitive business solutions.

Digital IT catalyzes information flow and drives business changes in a proactive mode by making continuous delivery of customer-tailored intuitive products/services/ solutions. Running the high-responsive IT means changeability, speed, flexibility, and risk intelligence. In order to survive and thrive amid rapid changes, it’s critical to make digital IT more shared, energetic, integrated, flexible, versatile, nimble, reliable, and fast. When IT learns to set the right priority, underpromise and over-delivery, it can gain a good reputation as a trustful partner steadily.

Posted in: Innovation,IT Transformation