Digital Tuning to Accelerate IT Performance

There's almost no business initiative these days where IT is not a big piece of the puzzle, information is permeating every corner of the business, and technology continues to disrupt and innovate almost all industries with the faster pace. Thus, CIOs need to maximize the multitude of IT value via pursuing strategic, innovative, and tactical alignment and integration with the business. And IT managers have to continue fine-tuning and accelerating IT performance to catalyze business growth and improve customer satisfaction.

Information fluidity: Digital is about flow, data flow, information flow, knowledge flow and mind flow. Information fluidity means to break down functional silos and streamline information flow, to make sure that the right information is in the right place at the right time and shared to the right persons. IT as the information steward of the business is to plan, collect, organize, use, control, store, disseminate, and dispose of its Information, and through which it help maximize business efficiency by effective information management, to ensure that the value of the information is identified and exploited to the maximum extent possible. Information fluidity is enabled via quality (right, accuracy), assurance (risk management) and exploitation (support business goals), and by which IT and overall business performance can be accelerated unprecedentedly.

Capability multiplier: A business capability is the set of abilities needed by an organization to do things effectively to achieve desired outcomes, measurable benefits and fulfill business demand consistently. A highly capable IT is business capability multiplier. IT is the only entity in the organization supposed to understand business entirely, has an oversight of organizational processes horizontally, and pays attention to the processes and inter-connectivity under the surface, in order to build crucial business capabilities. Digital capability tuning is the continuum, not just a one-time project. It is important to run IT as a business capability multiplier because a core business competency is a harmonization of multiple capabilities such that it permeates the entire organization with a focus, and in alignment with the resource-based view. In order to achieve business goals, organizations need to build a set of differentiated business capabilities, and IT is not just the sum of services or processes, but an enabler of business capabilities which can weave all necessary elements of the business into strategic capabilities and unique competency of the organization.

Paradox resolving: The paradox is the result of two opposing truths existing side by side, which can be both right. Business innovation has the characteristic of paradox, and often creativity is sparked by conflict. Efficiency will extract the maximum benefit from a new idea. The greater the efficiency of an organization, the greater the need is for creativity to maintain high performance in the long run. If an organization is inefficient, it will be inefficient with new ideas as well. Hence, efficiency and innovation just have to learn to live and function together. Same as the standardization vs creativity, standardization is inside-the-box, and innovation is outside-the-box. Hence, organizations indeed need both, and in fact, cannot realistically exist without a healthy leverage of both. IT leaders need to learn to resolve paradoxes in order to run a high mature IT with accelerated IT performance.

Besides the disruptive digital technology trends, IT effects in radical digital is to be an integrator in knitting all important business factors, to improve business agility, flexibility, and innovation; to fine-tune and deliver the tailored business solutions for accelerating IT and business performance, and to empower employees with efficient tools to improve their productivity, and to achieve the ultimate goal of building a customer-centric digital organization.

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