Friday, March 17, 2017

Running Digital IT with Triple-Speed

Organizations rely more and more on information and technologies; the IT department has more and more to overcome in running at digital speed.


Traditional IT organizations are often perceived as the controller which is slow to change and gets stuck in the lower level of maturity, as a reactive order taker. The type of speed issues in these IT organizations come from gaps created between IT and the rest of the company and IT leadership focus - being transactional or transformational? With the exponential growth of information and the increasing pace of changes, IT simply cannot sit still, it has to adapt to changes with the multitude of speed, run, grow, and transformation accordingly. IT effects in radical digital to reach digital premium is to become the business solutionary and change agent for driving digital transformation proactively and achieving the ultimate goal of building a high-responsive, high-effective, and high-performance digital organization.


Stability, efficiency, and operational excellence: Keep the lights on,” is always fundamental for running IT smoothly. Quick-fixing the handy issues is also necessary to build a good IT reputation. An effective CIO has to first stop the pain, take care of chronic operational issues and deliver much-requested upgrades and tactical solutions. Establish credibility, demonstrate that you understand the business, and you can act, not just planning. Traditional IT organizations have a controller’s mentality and sometimes lag behind the changes, as a result, the gaps between IT and business are enlarged. With the increasing speed of changes, keeping steady doesn't mean to be static or slow to change. It means IT has abilities for managing risks and opportunities with the balancing act along a continuum of risks and reward.


Agility, changeability, responsiveness: Digital means flow, digital IT has faster speed. So, you also have to strike the right balance between stability and agility. Digital IT is a business integrator in knitting all important business factors, to improve business changeability, responsiveness, agility, and flexibility. The leading IT organizations now explore the consumer based model -running faster, nimble and resilient, with digital speed, to focus on IT agility via building the right set of capabilities. Being agile is not just about process, practice, procedure but about culture, attitude, guidelines, and principles. Agility allows the CIO to consider ways to drive more ROI, integrate services and any number of additional IT value-added components which can be provided. Because IT can no longer feel like it has a monopoly on delivering solutions to the business. IT should play a strategically critical role in building up agile enterprises which can succeed in combining two distinct but interconnected elements: strategic responsiveness and organizational flexibility, with the combination of an innovative culture that advocates creative problem-solving and achieves business agility throughout the company.  


Acceleration, innovation, transformation: Speed matters for businesses surviving and thriving. Up to the next level, IT not only needs to adapt faster but needs to accelerate, innovate and speed up digital transformation. An accelerating IT separates the exploitation of the existing methods and technologies from the exploration of the new way to do things by leveraging the emergent digital trends. Enterprise leaders are increasingly looking to the IT function to introduce beneficial change into their business models to improve strategic performance, enforce customer intelligence and to position the enterprise for future industry leadership, etc. IT now plays a pivotal role in digital transformation, so IT needs to focus on the fastest speed available because that is where the main threat is to competitiveness. IT acceleration also means to speed up the organizational vehicle as well, to build the business competency for long-term growth and prosperity. There is no one size fits all, every organization has to take the right pace, walk the talk and explore its own sets of best practices and next practices for acceleration, innovation, and digital transformation.


Even the speed of change is increasing, businesses still do have contexts of relative certainty, while simultaneously having contexts reflecting both complexity and chaos. Each of these contexts requires a different management approach with the matching speed. But overall speaking, organizations rely more and more on information and technologies; the IT department has more and more to overcome in running at digital speed. IT must SPEED UP because speed matters for businesses to adapt to changes; to grasp the opportunities for marketing expansion; speed matters for building the new capabilities and gaining competency for both the business’s continuous improvement and leapfrogging digital transformation.


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