How to Unleash Digital Potential of IT

Digital technology is faster, lighter, and cheaper. Digital IT can unleash its full potential when technology embraces the art, creativity meets agility, and IT maturity is lifted from functioning to delight via interaction, innovation and intelligence.
Interaction: At the industrial Era, IT is perceived as a support center to take the order from the business. If the business only regards IT as a support function, then the priority will be operational efficiency. At the dawn of the Digital Era, IT needs to become a strategic partner of business, there must be a very clear understanding and agreement between IT and the business about the role of IT in the organization. Both business and IT have to stay on the same page about  strategy, and weave IT into business strategy, in order to build a bridge between IT and business. The connection between IT and Business lies in using the language to help business cross that bridge to IT. If the business expects IT to be a driver of innovation and change then the IT function needs to be flexible and responsive and even proactive. The business needs to know what IT can deliver and enter a dialogue about what best serves the goals of the business. Getting to this stage can take many years, but in order to get there, IT needs to be telling business about the opportunities and possibilities and that means IT needs to really understand the goals of the business.
Innovation: Often IT department are so busy in mundane day to day activities, they lose the sense of creativity over the period of time. Hence, CIOs have to learn the right and real things about organizations, not just via IT lenses, but via business lenses. Customer Centric Organization" means very different things to different people. Customer experience comes from all touch points, yet industrial organizations are structured by departments and it hinders company’s ability to create value. To run an innovative IT, it’s critical to listen, comprehend and understand the people and the business they are part of, before embarking on any new way of thinking to know where you have come from enables you to move to a new place even quicker.The best way for IT/technology to help win customers’ heart is to make most of IT and technology "invisible" to the customer. In other words, hide the complexity of IT/technology infrastructure & operations. What is left visible to the customer should be simple, intuitive, secure, reliable and predictable business solutions? This requires a cross-functional customer-centric paradigm for managing and operating IT/technology. Digital IT can drive all sort of innovations, proactively pushing ideas on how to leverage technology to drive revenue growth, increase business productivity, flexibility, and agility.
Intelligence: Digital IT is not only faster and lighter, but also smarter and influential. IT is shifting from a technology custodian to an information steward. Information Management makes information available and useful, exert lots of intelligence to capture customer insight and business foresight.  The intention of Eco-Information Management Life Cycle (Data-Information-Knowledge-Insight- Wisdom) is to build a high intelligent organization via capturing insight & foresight in making the right business decisions timely and bringing profits to the organization for the long term. IT is also a change agent to advocate data-based culture and lead the organization to the age of insight. Information applies to the context and environment in which decisions are made. Information,.
IT is the business, to unleash the digital potential of IT, organizations need to understand that IT is not just technical or scientific, but also artistic and delightful, and it can digitize every touch point of customer experience, it can also generate revenue and influence business decisions. IT leaders can identify the critical business issues by working closely with a business partner from a long-term perspective, and leverage technology to improve interactive communication, enforce innovation management, and capture business insight across the enterprise boundary.

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