Thursday, April 7, 2022

Itassessment

IT can help to weave all important business elements such as people, process technology & tools into the building blocks of change capability.


Due to exponential growth of information, IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. Even as the speed of change is increasing, businesses still do have contexts of relative certainty, while simultaneously having contexts reflecting both complexity and chaos. 

The management will make an objective assessment: What will change about the business in the mid or long term in order to achieve the strategic plan? What are the impacts of those changes on IT? Shall we make heavier investments in IT enabled products or service development? IT strategy is an integral component of business strategy; IT maturity directly impacts business maturity.

Assess current functional maturity & capability and overall organizational capability & maturity: IT management is not for its own sake, but enables business to achieve high performance results. Thus, IT needs to become strategic partners of the business. The IT management and business management needs to work hand in hand, make an objective assessment of functional capability and maturity: Do the functional areas in each part of the business have what they need to achieve the mid or long term business plan? How about an organization as a whole? In IT: What things are in place that will enable the business strategy? What can be done to strengthen them? What’s the business perception of IT? What things are in place that will inhibit or endanger the business strategy? What can be done to minimize them? Are the right skills in place? Are there any IT skill gaps? Are costs in line with strategic planning?

Gather as much input from all the business groups and departments including adherence to industry standards, approach to human resources showing support of overall organizational growth or shrinkage by following industry ratios, and sourcing alternatives, with an in-depth understanding about organization's capacity for change or innovation. In order to diagnose the critical problems that need to be solved, participants in the planning must ask probing questions to get deep down to the underlying or “root causes” that brought organizations to its current state. Some “roots” are problems, others are strengths. Both should be explored.

Assess current IT maturity and capability: Traditional IT organizations focus on keeping the lights on, reacting to changes, taking orders from the business to fix immediate problems, cutting cost to improve business efficiency. High mature IT organizations are proactive, strategic and innovative partners of the company to unlock digital potential. Thus, the IT management needs to look inward, make an objective assessment of the organizational capability and maturity by asking: how effective does IT enable the business growth, and how coherent are your IT-enabled digital capabilities?

A comprehensive set of enterprise-wide information management capability enables better information access and analysis by breaking down the silos, reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Increases IT alignment and engagement with the business. IT should both leverage powerful digital technologies to improve internal users’ productivity, engagement, and creativity; but also take initiatives to digitize the touch point of the end user’s customer experience, improve the overall business responsiveness and maturity. To improve its maturity, IT has to reinvent itself, top business leaders need to reimagine how to leverage information & technology to build differentiated business competency. It is the journey with thoughtful strategic planning and a step-wise approach to reach IT and overall organizational maturity.

What could cause you to fail? How to improve IT enabled strategy success rate: There's an old saying that goes, "there's a million ways to fail and one to succeed." In traditional companies, most of the time failures are not structural; either they missed a market opportunity, over-invested in a particular opportunity, or information technology fragility, etc. To decrease the probability of failure, brainstorming scenarios for failure in the future helps everyone be clear about what you don't want to happen and what can be done to avoid it. The other condition necessary to make failure a learning opportunity is self-insight into the cause of the failure and the alternative courses of action that could have been pursued and makes it a real “lesson learned.” Without the insight, the likelihood of the same situation repeating itself again in the future is higher.

Failure builds insight and resilience. In structural failures in which the learning can be applied in the future, the company generally fails. The management needs to ponder: What's going on in the market? Where are the suppliers headed? Where are the competitors headed? Where are the customers headed? Like many other things in business, it is a balancing act to have enough failure and an environment that encourages learning from failure quickly and cheaply, avoiding having failures that are too frequent or too expensive.

High mature IT organizations are at an inflection point to lead an organizational level digital transformation. IT can help to weave all important business elements such as people, process technology & tools into the building blocks of change capability. Contemporary companies must leverage IT and encompass all of the relevant disciplines in place, actively monitor opportunities & risks in order to recognize and act on them in a time frame that will yield strategic advantage and highlight the very characteristics of flexibility, agility, and innovation. IT should become a digital solutionary to enable measurable business outcomes.

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