Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Running Bold IT to Pursue Innovation Opportunities

To keep IT relevant, IT management needs to take calculated risks and proactively pursue opportunities to improve business revenue, contribute to the top line business growth.

In forward-thinking companies across the vertical sectors, IT is transforming from a reactive support center and business enabler to a proactive change agent and the business revenue creator. The expectations for CIOs have also grown multifold, they are expected to be visionaries and path-finders to pursue business innovation opportunities, opening new revenue stream and leverage IT to build competitive advantage of the business.




Take advantage of the IT vantage point to surface ideas proactively: Innovation often happens at the intersection of Information Technology and people, business and customer. The creative idea is often, if not always arrived through the interaction of ideas from different domains of thoughts, knowledge, and experiences cross-domain without boundaries. IT has to become an integral part of business driver and they can do so by marrying technology with strategy. IT leaders must realize that stifling creative side of IT will set back the business, it’s critical to work closely with business stakeholders and bring together ideas and resources to create something novel and achieve business objectives in any way possible. In fact, IT is the linchpin to integrate all critical pieces for implementing innovation, accelerating validation of facts about business ideas, benefits and shortcomings, applications and disruptive technologies. The success of IT driven innovation should be evaluated on how IT is able to surface ideas proactively, deliver innovative products, services, or business models to achieve top-line business growth by maximizing ROI.

Grasp Total Cost Ownership Opportunities: Digital organizations must manage information effectively, and bring to the table a healthy innovation portfolio with a right mix of breakthrough innovation and incremental innovation. From finance perspective, IT investment must facilitate business but also bring down the incremental cost of growth and the time to market. The management needs IT to become the cost optimization expert for the entire company, grasp TCO ownership opportunities, discover creative sources of business competitive advantage, to better compete in an expanded and hyper-competitive marketplace. Total Cost of Ownership is often held up as the critical metric for IT performance in high mature organization. Assume you're going to allocate the cost of IT investment across several revenue-generating initiatives, whatever the cost is estimated to be, they will then need to determine the net increase in revenue at current margins needed to offset the cost of business. So the management can get a clearer picture of IT solutions from cost, transparency, innovation, and maturity lens.


Practice intrapreneurship activities: To reinvent IT as the business growth engine, innovative IT organizations are practicing intrapreneurship and running IT as a software startup. As a matter of fact, IT entrepreneurialism becomes a new fixture to substantiate competitive position, improves company performance by increasing the firm’s pro-activeness and willingness to take risks, pursue innovation opportunities, pioneer the development of new products, processes, and services through enriching its competitiveness, drive new business revenue growth, and shape the digital landscape. Innovation is to reinvent business, but not to reinvent the wheel. Running IT as innovation catalyst is about nurturing a way of ‘out-of-them-box” thinking and keeping creative energy flow into every dimension of the business. Intrapreneurship is a unique combination of innovative mentality, attitude and high mature leadership behaviors. The great intrapreneur IT leaders can envision how emerging technology trends impact on the business direction, articulate the big why behind business initiative clearly, explain the strategic rationale behind the venture, have the right dose of risk appetite and show resilience to recover from failures.

To keep IT relevant, IT management need to take calculated risks and proactively pursue opportunities to improve business revenue, contribute to the top line business growth. CIOs should practice open leadership styles, be able to convey the technological vision, run the bold IT to pursue innovation opportunities, and improve innovation management effectiveness.

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