Make Radical Shift to Improve IT Organizational Maturity

IT strength and competency directly impact the competency of the business, IT maturity is proportional to the maturity of the entire company.

Information Technology is permeating into every corner of the organization and continues to grow in importance to the company across the vertical sectors. The increasing speed of changes forces IT leaders to get really creative on how they architect and implement change, make broader, deeper, and bolder impact, and ensure that IT is strategically positioned to be ahead of where the business is moving next, in order to drive change and lead the digital paradigm shift seamlessly.



From business afterthought to forethought: In many traditional organizations, IT is just a service provider and afterthought of the business executive and usually IT leaders don’t have a seat at the big table to co-develop the strategy. It significantly limits the business potential because emerging digital technologies and abundant information can lift the company up to a more advanced stage of digital explorement, set models and platforms that work best to meet business goals. When IT is the afterthought of the business, the strategy implementation often fails apart because it’s too late for strong technical solutions to be implemented in time or there are just too few efforts to improve the strategic value of the business effectively. Furthermore, forward-looking organizations can leverage information-based forecast to bring business insight, allowing business functions, stakeholders, and executives clearly foresee what’s happening so that they can acquire new abilities to reshape products or services for delighting customers or engaging employees, enter new markets, explore digital marketing channels or optimize daily operations continually.

From the weakest link to superglue of the company: In many organizations, IT is still an isolated function and one of the weakest links to fail the business either technically or strategically. The disconnect between the business and IT is one of the biggest root causes to fail IT and business as a whole. To improve business performance and speed, the role of digital IT is to identify and blend the ways that IT can link all digital aspects (goals, objectives, actions, etc.) of the business together to enforce business competencies and unlock performance. IT has to shift from the weakest link to superglue. IT is the only function in an organization which has the touch point with all other functions to keep optimizing business processes and information systems, and provide the necessary integration to ensure seamless strategy execution. The highly effective corporations can embed the power of information in its fiber to weave agility and other business competencies, to ensure it is part of the digital mechanism and linchpin for driving changes and improving business responsiveness and organizational maturity..

From cost center to revenue generator of the enterprise: Many companies still perceive IT as a cost center to “keep the lights on” only. To reinvent IT reputation as a revenue generator, top-notched CIOs in various industries are creating new ways to pull in revenue at their companies. Nowadays, business leaders are increasingly looking to the IT function for introducing beneficial change into their business models to improve business performance. IT management at all levels needs to understand how the business makes and loses money, and it needs to articulate solutions around this with business language, look for solutions which will directly benefit the external end customer, improve competitive advantages and in-turn, bring in increased business revenue. These engagements are leading IT to become much more proactive to spot opportunities for increasing business revenue, proposing and developing a compelling strategic business case for IT initiatives with identified benefit flows and believable dollar values.

IT strength and competency directly impact the competency of the business, IT maturity is proportional to the maturity of the entire company. Digital CIOs are uniquely qualified to envision the digital trends and manage IT in an iterative cycle to design, build, scale, and optimize business competencies and make some radical shift to achieve desired effects. The payoff of IT digital transformation is not just for the quick win, but to build the long-term business competency.

Posted in: Digital Maturity,IT Innovation,IT Transformation