Monday, August 24, 2020

The Monthly “Change Agent CIO” Book Tuning: Drive Change and Improve IT Maturity Aug. 2020

Organizations reach the turning point when their top business leaders can think outside the current constraints and comfort zones, empower IT to break down silos, and take the bold move to drive changes in a structural way.

Change is inevitable, organizational change has become a common practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. This is the bureaucracy’s way of meeting the challenges. 

A digital transformation is achieved via dynamic Strategy-Execution-Change lifecycle management, though it is not all linear steps, but an iterative, ongoing, and upgoing change continuum. What are digital CIO’s profiles and how to reboot IT to get digital ready and cultivate the culture of learning and innovating?

      

Drive Change and Improve IT Maturity    



Use IT Architecture as a Practical Tool to Improve Organizational Maturity Due to the pervasive technology update and information penetration, businesses today not just use IT as a digital extension, but leverage IT across the company to maximize the business value. IT architecture has two purposes: one is to support the “maintenance” by describing how IT should be in its current states to “keep the lights on” efficiently; the other is to describe how IT enables business change, especially the large scale digital transformation when the well-defined vision is implemented and in the various stepping stages on the way to reach the higher level of organizational maturity.

How should Executive Teams Provide Input Upon Varying Issues for Improving IT Maturity? Organizations across vertical sectors declare they are in the information management business. Many think the new way of running a high-performance business is a set of interdisciplinary management principles and practices through the Information Technological lens. Highly innovative companies must leverage IT and encompass all of the relevant disciplines in place and actively monitor emerging business opportunities in order to recognize and act on them in a time frame that will yield strategic advantages.

Running Logical IT by Evolving Five-Step Digital Flow IT is an engineering discipline, as always, but adding a 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 a five-step digital flow.

Transforming IT from Monolithic Hardware Oriented to Mosaic Software DrivenWith overwhelming growth of information and rapid changes, the role of IT in the current business environment should become strategic, enable business outcomes, build organizational competency, and catalyze business growth. IT leaders need to make an objective assessment: What’s the focal point of IT- monolithic hardware-oriented, or the bits & bytes information-driven? Inside-out operation-driven or outside-in customer-centric? Transaction or transformation focus?

Take a Logical Scenario to Drive IT Change Management Digital transformation isn’t just an extension of continuous improvement of the current business, but a quantum leap with radical change. It requires a unique vision and the tremendous courage to pursue it. Due to the exponential growth of information and the “disruptive power” of digital technologies, IT needs to become a “Change Department” because it is in a unique position to manage business information and capture the oversight of the entire company. Organizations reach the turning point when their top business leaders can think outside the current constraints and comfort zones, empower IT to break down silos, and take the bold move to drive changes in a structural way.

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