Running Digital IT as DECISIONEERING & SOLUTIONEERING & ENGINEERING

Forward-thinking IT organizations continue to reinvent themselves to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and agility. Ambitious companies also understand how crucial IT is to drive businesses growth and optimize business capabilities. Digital transformation is on the way. IT Transformation seeks to change. The word "transformation" in itself means change and change for the better - new ways and methods of doing things, new structures, new relationships etc. The contemporary CIOs are visioneers - who can run a digital IT as decisioneering, solutioneering and engineering changing organization.
Running digital IT as decisioneering: IT as the steward of business information takes important responsibilities to ensure the right people getting the right information to make right decisions. IT must embrace a responsibility to engineer best practice decision paths, “decisioneering" if you will. This demands a disciplined, process-based approach not only to data and information but also a deep understanding of the decisions that need to be made and their impact. IT must design information strategies around decisions. IT needs to be seamlessly embedded into the business decision processes, also plays a crucial role in building an information -based decision-making culture. At traditional companies, both strategic decisions and operations decisions are often based on static or often outdated information available and the “gut feeling” of decision makers. Now the abundance of information flow and the more advanced technologies make it possible to gain real-time insight and business foresight if organizations are truly being digitized underneath, at the process level. What should be focused on is the integration of IT into the business decisions and processes to be highly responsive. Hence, running IT as decisioneering will help to build a high-intelligent and high-agile organization.
IT has to get more involved in the business as Solutioneering: Traditional IT is run as an inside-out operational driven service provider and measured via internal IT lenses. IT managers who become territorial over the department only compound the problem. It is not sufficient enough to reinvent IT as an outside-in customer-centered business partner for problem solving. IT as a ‘Solutionary’ to understand how the organization works and then give solutions that will increase the functionality to lower cost and, if applicable, increase output. That means a higher profit. Besides improving efficiency, IT should do more profitable things for the organization. The focus of IT needs to engage with the business units to find out how the department is perceived, what the pain points are and to identify opportunities for developing new services or improving/optimizing current ones. A CIO can't just sit back and apply yesterday’s techniques to today's problems, the key is engagement with the business. The CIO has a role in selling the merits of IT to the business and quantifying projects in terms of ROI.
IT is an engineering discipline, as always, but adding more enriched digital context: Digital CIOs are intrapreneur to run IT as a software startup. They apply scientific logic with the structural approach and engineering discipline to break big business problems down into deliverable chunks to deliver value to the business at regular intervals. From software management perspective, it is the stepwise scenario to identify mindsets, technical and nontechnical strategies, and tactics needed to realize the new software engineering approach. This would include strategic and tactical planning, Systems Engineering, concurrent engineering, project design, quality engineering, optimization, systems ecology, etc. Digital organizations become more dynamic and responsive, open systems concepts will focus on meeting the needs of the environment, socialization will improve the collaboration, communication, cooperation, and coordination and software economics will increase customer value. Digital engineering approach is combined with the simplification of programming tools and proliferation of “DIY” - doing it yourself interfaces. An effective CIO’s job is to improve operations to reduce the burden on the company while trying to stay current with ever-changing technologies. That includes reducing costs, improving systems, streamlining processes and providing continually expanding business solutions.
The purpose of IT is to move the business forward with the speed. Technology and its associated methodologies and practices are parts of that leverage mechanism. IT role is critical to operational business success, but it is ever more important for business strategy and digital transformation via practicing decisioneering, solutioneering, and engineering.  Still, IT is the means to the end, not the end.
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