Five Aspects of Running a High-Mature Digital IT

Although information is the lifeblood, and technology is the force behind digital technology, IT plays a significant role in digital transformation. Still, more than half of IT organizations get stuck on the bottom level of maturity, functioning as an isolated support center or service provider due to ineffective communication. Both senior leadership team and CIOs need to be clear in what needs to achieve in terms of top line, bottom line and working in tandem with other departments to achieve the IT goal. Or briefly speaking, what are further aspects of running a high-mature digital IT?
Digital Customer engagements: Digital is the age of customer-centricity. IT influences customers directly. Deploy a range of technologies that focus purely on improving the customer's experience and perception of business services, showing the customer that you are making significant investment to deliver to them products, services, or solutions which more closely meet their needs, New technology tools and business models allow a company to capture customer information on a continual basis. Hence, IT plays a critical role in digitizing the touch point of customer experience. Imagine collecting valuable information about customers in real time and getting that to the right teams inside your company, for improve overall customer experience and develop the best or next products/services to meet the customer need and improve the business profitability. And you are doing so to a greater extent than your competitors. And you can enthusiastically present, directly or through marketing, the investments in such technologies to customers and prospects.
Digital workforce involvement: People are always the most invaluable asset in businesses. “Hiring the right person to the right position at the right time,” is the mantra of many forward-thinking organizations. IT is the glue and integrator which plays an important role in integrating people, process and technology into a cohesive set of business capabilities. There are some of the issues where must be aware of integration of a single talent capability into an integrated enterprise people management capability across all enterprises. Digital talent management capability needs to have the new digital dimension to handle digital new normal, IT needs to work closely with HR and other functions for improving cross-functional or cross-geographical communication, collaboration, and overall digital workforce involvement.
Digital solutions/product / service developments: Digital IT needs to be an explorer. CIOs expressing a need to free up their staff from commodity activities to spend more time on strategic or business initiatives. Although improving IT efficiency is always important,  increasingly, there is a need for increased agility and a desire for usage based cost models. These and a few other strategic needs are driving IT organizations to look at alternative hybrid delivery models with emergent SMAC digital technology trends for increased revenue and profits. IT leaders need to continue to “trim” and refine IT via consolidation, integration, modernization, and optimization. The activities of a manager are clearly supported by many functional departments. These activities are about planning, organizing, resourcing, integrating, measuring, and developing people.                    Digital capability building, including innovation: The pervasive digitization requires both business and technology professionals to rethink how things are done in organizations. Organizational capabilities that exist and the need to be developed, both for necessity and competitive advantage.  IT as a conductor helps integrate/optimize/orchestrate business processes which underpin business capabilities, and facilitate the business outcome, usually through technology or data in and of itself for paving the path to digital transformation. IT role is also to be a facilitator to business processes and capability builder to align business strategy and goals with technology-enabled solutions, their view of the company strategies and the strategies in their group,
Digital Organization structures tuning: Digital does make the organization flatter and even hyperconnected. IT will help to continue tuning the organizational structure via understanding the high-level functions of your organization, and assessing the stage in a life cycle the company is at or the type of jobs that need to be done. Re-org should be seen as a goal driven project, not for its own sake, but justify a solid business case, subjected to reality-based cost-benefit analysis, well align people, process and technology, to make change happen not only on the structural surface, but via fine tuning business capacity. The main drivers remain access to capacity, skills, and flexibility over ramping up and down according to project demands, amongst others. Moreover, a gap analysis, skills assessment, efficiency study, workflow analysis, and knowledge of trends and models that work best to meet the business goals are needed before new schemes and designs are created and agreed upon across the business and all shared services.
Digital transformation is a step-wise journey. IT is an enabler and catalyzer for business to reach the era of radical digital. Running a high mature digital IT is accomplished by establishing strong interdependent relationships, the shared vision, and wisdom, the frictionless business culture, the re-framed processes to bridge silo, and the optimal sets of business capabilities to delight customers.
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