Setting the Right Priorities to Run Digital IT with Full Speed

IT plays a significant role in digital transformation of the business because information is permeating every corner of the business and technology is often the disruptive force of innovation. However, the majority of IT organizations get stuck in the lower level of maturity, overloaded and understaffed. How to set the right priority to run digital IT with full speed?
Setting priority to solving the problems making most impact on strategy: The higher mature IT is a business partner, rather than a service desk, and IT leaders need to have the strategic mindset and skill-set to contribute business problem defining and solving. IT should play as an optimistic and cautious innovator with an in-depth understanding of technology potential and limitation, opportunity, and risk, IT needs to become a strategic partner of the business, the intimate Business-IT partnership is the ultimate status for IT to deliver better fit, right-on and cost-effective solutions, even you can not fulfill all business’s demands, but you deliver what you promise, and you do what is best fit for business’s strategy and goals.
It is both the art and science to know when to say YES, and when to say NO to your internal customers: Being customer-centric doesn't mean just being an order taker, it means to focus on implementing things really important to improve customer centricity. Hence, you need to be humble enough to listen to customers; also be confident enough to say 'NO' with the fair reasons. Sometimes, what IT and users define as "innovation" are two entirely different things. To the IT department, it means pushing the limits of technology, whereas to the users it means making their jobs and lives simpler. In some well-established organizations, IT is the controller with a bit ‘arrogant' attitude, without doing enough to engage business into collecting requirement and setting priority. The business requires that IT provides solutions to real-life business problems. This can only be achieved by constant engagement and both sides seeing the other as a "partner" rather than an adversary.
The CIO has to make a priority choice based on ROI and risk: Understanding the technology is one thing, understanding the impact of the change to the business is another thing entirely. IT contribution to business value does not come from the technology itself, but from the change that IT both shapes and enables. Only based on in-depth understanding of business, the CIO has to make a priority choice based on ROI and calculated risks. The CIO is responsible for new technology adoption, the CIO's role is more than strategy implementer and more into strategy maker or at least with the influential power to shape and keep in harmony the business, market, products, and resources. The CIO can only set the right priority choice if they have the data available to them and proactively understand business and customer first to avoid changing for technology’s sake. So IT organizations can innovate towards simplicity and discover new secure way to improve business agility and customer satisfaction.
Setting priority to leverage limited resources and talent to maximizing business value is an important step in climbing organizational maturity. Ultimately, more transparency in the IT value proposition to the business plus more engagement a partnership is needed with the business. IT should be creating value across organizational lines and not silo-ed as in years gone by, and IT can run with full speed without too many distractions and misunderstanding.







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