The Daily Grinding of IT

Today’s IT organization plays a significant role in digital transformation, IT needs to be strategic, innovative, forward-thinking, agile, flexible, speedy, and customer centric. However, every journey starts with the first step, the long term perspectives come with the daily grinding. Thinking big, and start small. How can IT leaders manage IT with daily best practice, to not just fixing the symptoms, but building its capabilities and make continuous delivery to achieve the strategic goals and fulfilling the business vision.
IT daily grinding needs to focus on improving operational excellence and customer satisfaction: “Keep the lights on” is still fundamental to run an efficient IT organization, IT’s daily grinding is important to continue optimizing business processes and managing IT cost. Every part of the company should do what it can to gain results while spending the least cost necessary, buy what you need, use it to the fullest, and running IT as a business, to ensure all resources, human capitals and budget are used in the best manner possible. This dimension is to create a frictionless channel for resources to flow from the top line to the bottom line.  IT often suffers from overload, lack of resource, and talent shortage, and managing IT delivery including supporting process development projects in other parts of the company and sometimes no time left selling the idea about investing in their own processes. As daily practices, IT needs to be proactively planning, not justing taking order, but working closely with internal customers to improve overall business operation. IT shouldn’t always look at itself from inside out via IT lense, but via outside-in customer viewpoint, to ensure the daily task helps the business build the competency for delighting both internal and external customers, and improving agility.
Prioritization is also important for IT to take daily practices and improve information management effectiveness: There are too many things in the daily agenda of IT.  Many IT leaders cite mistakes in managing the demand pipeline, either by not setting the right priorities well with the business units, or just taking on too much and crushing their team. The major contributing factors to IT overloading are “ineffective leadership,”  "insufficient resources," “de-motivated teams,” and the classic “can’t say no.” Doing daily grinding doesn’t mean IT should ignore its role refining. Indeed, continuing refining its role via effective communication and cross-functional collaboration needs to be the daily practice as well. Without effective communication and prioritization skills, the business often doesn't understand how IT can help, and IT doesn't know what the business needs. The business thinks they know what they need, or the IT department thinks they know what the business need. And then the gaps between IT and business enlarged and IT perhaps just keeps “busyness,” without solving real issues. Being customer centric also doesn’t mean saying YES to every request from internal users. What the business really needs is an IT group that can say no with good reasons, and offer alternative solutions that meet the goals.
“Doing more with innovation” should become the daily motto for IT as well: Innovation is not serendipitous, it takes daily practice to make IT “innovation fluent.” However, people often get trapped in "That's the way we've always done it mentality" and that slows progress. And many leaders who have been with the same organization and grew from IT ranks for decades, lack of “out of box” thinking. To flex their innovation muscles, they need to have daily practices, either exploring the new way to solving the old problems, or learning from other industries or companies. Innovative CIOs need to work closely with the business partners, take business problems, collect feedbacks, discover solutions for them, simplify operations and be better partners with the rest of the organizations. They should also develop strategy and practices to manage innovation in a systematic way via fine tuning both idea creation and idea management scenario, increase value propositions, and run a highly innovative IT organization.
Uncertainty and ambiguity are a key challenge for business leaders today. The daily grinding of IT means the good balance of long term perspectives and short-term goals for the business. In the past, many business leaders believed their organizations’ long-term goals could wait until they had dealt with the current crisis. In the current business environment, this is no longer the case, the rate of change is increasing, it implies that business leaders must learn how to strike a balance between managing complex issues today and predicting the uncertain issues of tomorrow. IT should focus on doing things matter today for its customers and business, also keep eyes on the horizon, not just keep hands busy, but keep it flow, to be a digital brain of the business, thinking harder and working smarter, to improve business maturity and accelerate the business’s digital transformation.
Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu