How to Leverage IT to Enforce the Business Changeability

Digital is all about CHANGE. One of the differentiated business capabilities is AGILITY. Being agile means anticipating likely change and addressing it deftly, keeping business on course and customers satisfied. IT is the business enabler and forces to change. How to leverage IT to enforce the business changeability?
IT is like the business change engine. Change is a dance between the top management and the affected parts of the organization.  And Change Management have to maintain and fix any imbalance in those elements by involving the executives in the HR, IT and operations, and taking a structured approach, to make sure all of the management is on board and educated well on the change objectives and how to carry them out effectively. Organizations can make major leaps forward in change capability by involving the entire organization in major change efforts that support key business strategies to drive performance improvement. Change Management is all about balancing the main elements impacting change such as people ( most important one), strategies, processes/ procedures and IT. IT is not only the superglue but also the integrator to weave all important change elements seamlessly and make people change, process change, and technology change sustainable.
Change becomes a dynamic business capability in which IT is the key enabler. Change becomes a dynamic business capability, not just a one-time initiative or a static process. Continuous change has taken the form of rolling projects with several projects running simultaneously, and across several functional areas that often overlap. IT is at the unique position to oversight business processes, and thus, become an important change organization to improve the organization’s changeability and agility. The logical scenario to manage change life cycle and build change management capability includes: a) develop the business justification about the change and determine demand and estimated pipeline. b) assess current state of change capability with key elements such as people, process, and technology. c) Define the target change management capability via identifying the change gaps. d) Build change leadership team and source appropriate skills to deliver desired capability (internal / market / partners), also identify change agents within the business; educate champions and establish these as a key element for change management. e) Establish and enable change management team with efficient methodology, tools, products. f) Integrate change management into IT project management life cycles. g) Both reap quick win to demonstrate value, also sustain long term business transformation. Bridging the gap between IT and the business is an important issue about changes: It is important to first understand how much change capability is really required for the effort you are kicking off. Organizations "become complex," not for their own amusement, they do it to respond to environments more proactively. There are many shades of corporate complexity, some are desired, such as design or connectivity, others are not. Complexity is the nature of technology, however, often, the advanced technology helps to simplify things and delight customers, not the other way around. Bridging the gaps between IT and the business is an important issue about changes, and optimize business processes are the ongoing activities for IT. The disconnect between business and IT not only causes miscommunication but even worse to fail the business. Optimization is not just about fixing things, but leveraging tradeoff to improve business efficiency, flexibility, agility, and risk intelligence. Dysfunctions and inefficiencies are easier to uncover if there is a good measurement system is in place. Therefore, even technology is often complex in nature, IT needs to be a business simplifier and optimizer to improve business changeability and manageability.
IT is an integral part of the business and, “the business” and “IT” are inextricably linked in the 21st century. From digital transformation perspective, a “Change Agent” IT can orchestrate the processes, tools and products that organizations use to effect the transformation from strategy to deployment. From a finance perspective, the better the quality of change management program, the more anticipated benefits, and deliverables will be achieved.



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