Initiativestohandlefuzzyfrontend

The inevitable range, breadth, depth, and pace of uncontrollable factors acting on any organizations across vertical sectors mean identifying business vulnerability, handling the management fuzziness and constant fine-tuning are essential to improve the organizational maturity.

Running a business is complex today, and accelerating business transformation is extremely challenging as there are many moving parts, interdependent pieces, and interconnected relationships that keep evolving. It’s transformational for the corporate management to step outside of the organizational system for having different perspectives to gain an in-depth understanding of the business dynamics, deal with the fuzzy front end of the digital paradigm and make a smooth transition.




Resource allocation and capital management fuzziness: Organizations have limited resources, but there are so many things going on for the corporate management nowadays. The capital and resource allocation (money, focus, time, and people) commitment will be fuzzy until the key challenges are understood and agreed upon. How resource allocation is determined should be understood by all important parties; and the successful business capacity planning and management are critical to ensuring that the resource is available before they are needed. Put the framework in place to map the strategic objectives into key performance indicators, and then determine what capital investments will accelerate the changes you want to see, and make the evaluation based on financial metrics with projection of future revenue.

Organizations have limited resources, many businesses took a big bite of resources to keep the lights on, only leaving very little for accelerating business growth and transforming the business for the long run. In many organizations, resources management becomes a bottleneck for digital transformation success. Quite a few managers underestimate the resources necessary to complete important business initiatives or explore innovation. To deal with the fuzziness of resource and capital management, make sure the executive team first understands what it needs to drive future business growth and improve cash flow. You should spend to make a return. Make business investment justification to ensure that the organization spends the money in the right way and getting the right results.

Integration could be very fuzzy and hard to justify ROI: To improve organizational efficiency, effectiveness and maturity, there is a variety of integrations such as technical information technology integration, operational integration, GRC integration or customer experience integration, etc, which need to be handled seamlessly. Integration has a set of costs and benefits that are determined by the situation and what is integrated. Usually integration hairball is hard to get untangled. Integrating business processes in dissimilar businesses that have little in common makes little sense. And each integration effort perhaps spins off into chain reactions that may not be recognized until the budget is gone. The fuzziness in integration will cause management confusion and business deceleration.

Integration is very simply the task of connecting systems so they can share and consume each other's data, process, resources or talent, etc. It is for simplification, optimization, reusability and scalability. An effective integration provides a focus for managing an integration relevant business initiatives and applications in a structural way. The management should understand that "integration" is not always cost-effective, and estimate whether those costs should be offset by benefits before attempting to take initiatives for integration. The successful integration will depend on the underlying business relationships between all of the crucial points and how they influence each other in building differentiated business competency.

Application modernization seems to remain an elusive, fuzzy concept and cause hassles for IT management: Organizations are run with the mix of old and new technology. Organizations continue to add new applications, and application vendors continue to upgrade to keep in step with the newest operating systems. For some legacy applications, it could be too costly to modernize, especially for some struggling organizations and industries. Some of these older applications often require other legacy applications that are used for management and maintenance. Consolidation, modernization, rationalization, or optimization, etc, are not one-time initiatives, but an ongoing management continuum.

Also, to overcome the fuzziness of application cycle management, remember that your current management and governance practices generated your irrational applications and may need to be upgraded to improve business effectiveness and cost-efficiency. Application modernization and rationalization can’t be successful unless when the short-term business objectives and quick win nature of application management were transformed into the long-term strategic decision for the IT organization, supported with activities to increase the maturity of the IT governance process and skills of the organization as a whole.

The inevitable range, breadth, depth, and pace of uncontrollable factors acting on any organizations across vertical sectors mean identifying business vulnerability, handling the management fuzziness and constant fine-tuning are essential to improve the organizational maturity. It’s important to laser focus on the most critical challenge businesses need to overcome, mobilize the organization to accept and work toward achieving the long-term business vision and institutionalize the changes that must last over time.

Posted in: CIO Leadership,Digital Agility,IT Transformation