Saturday, March 23, 2019

Five Characteristics of IT Maturity

Digital maturity is the state of ripeness, quality, fluency, delight, zest, balance, and resilience.

Compared to the considerably static industrial age, the digital environment is complex, uncertain, unpredictable and unrepetitive. Organizations rely more and more on technology, and IT needs will only expand. Thus, the CIO’s ability to build fundamental business competency is now greater than ever. How well an IT organization can adapt to the dynamic environment directly affects the future of the business. IT maturity is proportional to overall business maturity. IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. Here are five characteristics of IT maturity.

Robustness: IT is perhaps one of the most sophisticated puzzle pieces in a modern company. Because technology is complex and the information is overloading. Digital organizations are the robust and adaptive living system which are comprised, in part, of people, processes, and technologies. The dynamic digital organizations need to get away from letting things fall through and start creating an “integrated wholes” by utilizing correct processes and running IT as the linchpin. All such systems function, grow and prosper by continually adapting, evolving, and improving flexibility, versatility, and resilience of the company. You cannot run a digital-driven and nimble business without "de-complexitizing," or "de-bureaucracy," and make transparent on what is being delivered and how or what is being delivered. IT is not just the business of the IT department, it must break down the functional silos, and take a structural approach to consolidate, modernize, integrate, automate, and optimize for improving its functional performance, robustness, competencies, and maturity. 

Comprehensiveness: Information is the most invaluable commodity individuals and organizations produce in the digital environment in which they currently function. It’s also one of the most invaluable business assets need to be managed successfully! However, many organizations feel overwhelming by the exponential growth of information. IT should help the organization harness and understand the information to capture the real-time business insight, provide ways to better recognize and act on the comprehensive information for gaining competitive advantage. Information does not live alone but permeates into everywhere in the businesses. In many legacy organizations, their methods, and procedures to process information are siloed and outdated, stifle information flow, and thus, business flow. To achieve information comprehensiveness and knowledge abundance, IT plays a significant role in refining information to gain broad business insight and hande execution intensity in a structural way.

Responsiveness:
Digital means rapid changes and continuous disruptions. How successful organizations can handle digital disruptions depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to the ever-changing environment. The degree of business responsiveness depends on how those systems and subsystems interact with each other, and those interactions can be structural, technical, informational, or human. Digital organizations must have strategic responsiveness to process business information almost real-time, communicate and collaborate with business counterparts timely. Running a real-time digital organization means high-responsiveness and high speed. Breaking down silo thinking and digitizing the management disciplines and practices are the first step for running a high-responsive digital organization. Business management also needs to have flexibility for taking the different approach to meet the business’s expectation, leveraging tailored methods to fit specific circumstances, and ultimately respond to the external environment promptly.

Fitness: The term 'fit' in the dynamic digital environment can be interpreted with a degree of variability. Different organizations perhaps set varying criteria to evaluate “digital fit.” Organizational fit, manifested in accepted and expected behavior, has a way of neutralizing differences. Where you want to look for 'fit' is in relation to the values you want to build or maintain within your team, and the kinds of behaviors that you would expect to see as a result of, or in alignment with, those values. From the business management perspective, digital fit means putting the right people with the fitting mindset and capabilities in the right position to solve the right problems. More specifically, how do you define the right problem, the complexity level of problems, and how can you solve them in better ways? It’s important to identify the skill gaps and define the technical or functional competencies required, integrate talent management, culture management, change management, and performance management into a holistic people management approach to fit the purpose and achieve strategic business goals.


Innovativeness: Digital is the age of innovation. To deal with change and fierce competitions and to move forward from information robustness to innovation excellence, do not focus on hierarchies but on ideas, innovation, openness, and problem-solving. Due to the fact that innovating in today’s digital world has become increasingly complex in nature, while the individual contributions provide the 'building block" of innovativeness, it is the collective consensus on what to do with them that is appealing. At the organizational level, innovation leaders need to define a clear vision, discover the blind spots, identify unknowns, bridge gaps, and ensure the organization will stay focusing on building their innovation competency. Cross-pollinating ideas, collaborating and sharing knowledge are what spurs innovation. Communication, collaboration, and coordination are necessities for keeping ideas flow and practicing good idea management. The dynamic digital ecosystem outlook helps the business connect the wider dots to innovate, also encourage the broader base collaboration to build differentiated business competencies.

IT is moving up its maturity from functioning to firm to delight. Digital maturity is the state of ripeness, quality, fluency, delight, zest, balance, and resilience. IT management must get a feeler of the business view, help in trying new technologies as a business enabler for developing differentiated business competency, expanding digital effects systematically and chartering the digital paradigm shift seamlessly.

0 comments:

Post a Comment