The New Book “IT Innovation” Introduction Chapter 2 Reimagine IT as as “Innovative Outlier”

Corporate IT plays a significant role in the digital transformation of the business. IT is shifting from a transaction-oriented help center to a change agent; from a reactive order-taker to a proactive strategy co-creator, and from a “isolated” support function to an “innovative outlier.”
Be innovative from the business lens: To run an innovative IT organization, the more difficult challenge is not just launching a successful team, but maintaining their motivation and focus. Point out that customer inquiries are not just support related, but can foster new and better ways the application can perform and optimize every touch point of customer experience. The intersection of IT and people is where innovation happens; companies need to invest in IT necessary to advance businesses through either incremental or radical innovation. Running IT as a innovative outlier is truly about bringing the new perspective to grow businesses and delight customers; to both capture opportunities and manage risks timely, to become customer-centric and business focused.
A CIO needs to think about freeing some time to learn for real business from the business strategist’s perspective: As a CIO, you need to understand what the organization’s expectation from IT through innovation lenses. There are a lot of opportunities to clarify the role of IT in innovation. IT is uniquely positioned to observe processes across the enterprise. Sometimes, when one business area has a new product that can be used by another, IT leaders can connect the dots to come up with new innovative solutions. Being able to become innovative or close is being able to think, and create new things based on its own needs, true knowledge is the optimal solution. High mature IT will enable building high mature organizations, there are very progressive organizations where IT sparks organizational creativity.
Running digital IT from “outside-in”: The digital philosophy is to live as “customers,” when practicing IT management. A valid strategic objective and strategy mapping allow you to first understand your customers and what they value, and then identify how to best characterize that value through IT portfolio management, define key indicators, and then define those measures appropriate to best assess the performance of these indicators because they show you how well they satisfy or delight customers. Digital revolution means that channels to customers. IT has both internal and end customers. IT plays a crucial role in optimizing and digitizing every touch point of customer experiences and improving overall customer satisfaction. Digital thinking means new learning attitude, from the business side, it means to show the constructive dissatisfaction, understand the risks and potential bear traps. Innovation is not always equal to the latest gadget, it’s about people, culture, partnership, manner, to build a customer-centric organization.
Running IT as an innovative outlier starts from mind shift of the IT leaders. IT plays a change agent role in business transformation. Innovation is an important business capability to decide the business's long-term prosperity. The CIOs’ innovation journey can be traced at the rocky road with all sorts of ups and downs, bumps and curves, but with clear goals to delight customers and run a delightful digital IT organization with zeal.

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