Three Learning Lessons to Harness IT and Business Relationship

Digital is about breaking down silo thinking and harness cross-functional communication and collaboration. Although, many say, the gaps between business and IT are actually enlarged because the different function of the business takes the different pace of digital transformation. The laggard would drag down the speed of change in the business. Hence, it’s important to build up a trust relationship between functions, without t good business relationships, every decision becomes an argument. The deeper the trust - the more valuable the relationship. Which learning lessons IT could share to harness cross-functional collaboration and improve organizational agility and maturity?
Quick Wins: Most IT organizations get stuck at the lower level of maturity, they have been perceived as cost centers by the business partners. Often times, there are a lot of projects/activities going on in an organization.Therefore, to build trust relationship, present IT value and share some success stories of quick win is significantly important. For example, a CIO might be interested in a summary of the IT ROI and TCO as a business case for change. Regardless of the analysis and design, and numerous spreadsheets of proven tangible and intangible benefits of IT project portfolio, an abstraction is created to convey to the business the value of change, identify and reap some quick wins. There are a lot of objects, components, and web services being created, however, the context for those IT initiatives is not clear. To reap some low hanging fruit and get some quick wins, IT needs to create a decent business capability map and use that to frame these activities or artifacts. Then IT management can use the capability map to drive portfolio management, and IT leaders can  set the right priority,  do the gap analysis and find a solution, demonstrate the value via showing some quick wins.
Learning from Failures:At the age of innovation, failure is seen as a fruit full of experience. Failure is part of innovation. It depends on how you read failure. The point is to fail fast and fail forward. Learning from others’ mistakes, also share the failure lessons with others are the great way to harness communication and build trust relationships. The other condition necessary to make failure a learning opportunity is self-insight. It is the insight into the cause of the failure and the alternative courses of action that could have been pursued that makes it a real “lesson learned.”Part of being a leader is taking the risk. If you take risks in doing innovation, you are going to fail at some of them. What makes leaders successful is what they do after they fail at something. What gives them the chance to do something else. The point is always to learn from the failure and fail forward.  Without the shared insight, the likelihood of the same situation repeating itself again in the future is higher. Through the insight shared and lessons learned from failures, IT and business can work more closely to avoid innovation pitfalls and achieve common business goals.
Innovation dilemma: Digital is the age of innovation. Digital innovation expands the horizon, with the full spectrum of approaches and practices, from radical, disruptive innovation, to incremental or evolutionary innovation; from the hard innovations, such as products/services/process innovation, to soft innovation, such as management/ communication/culture innovation, etc. In order to manage a full portfolio of innovation effectively, the IT and business partners need to share and deal with the innovation dilemmas constantly. Because whether an organization is more or less innovative depends on the clarity and precision with which its purpose is developed, understood and disseminated; and the extent to which people can buy into a realizable vision which contains the imperative to innovate. Further, breaking outdated rules is indeed an important part of creativity; however, to get the best results, you need to structure the creative process by setting certain rules. For instance, depending on where you are in the process, you might want to ‘force’ people to rephrase a challenge, let them view an idea from different perspectives, and set certain rules to manage innovation efficiently. Via dealing with innovation dilemma collectively, it seems that the more integrated and culturally based innovation or imagination is, the more sustainable and productive such initiatives are.
IT needs to attribute business value to its company in building close companionship with the business peers, customers, and partners, advance high effective IT leadership, also in developing multi-dimensional views of KPIs that show how IT is improving business and enforcing business competency for long-term prosperity. More than technology, the effective relationship can bridge business success. Still, the professional relationship goes beyond 'buddy' type. The better your management skills, the more you will be appreciated and the more productive your ideas will become, and the organization as a whole will become an integrated, agile and high mature digital leader.




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