The New Book “IT Innovation” Book Introduction Chapter 8 Run a Highly Innovative Digital Ready IT Organization

In today’s digital dynamic and technical environment where IT is being used more and more around the globe for revenue generating initiatives and the business is becoming IT. IT is moving up its maturity from functioning, to firm to delight, running full speed with less friction, unleash its full potential via improvement, and improve its maturity via intelligence and innovation. IT can weave all necessary business elements, either hard or soft, to orchestrate a digital symphony.
Experimentation: Running digital IT means innovation, customer-centricity, and proactive changes. Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. It means IT has to experiment the better way to do things, encourage creativity because digital transformation efforts need to be undertaken as the means of getting to a defined different capability to accomplish a defined goal. Experient the better way to communicate and collaborate with business partners. Digital is the age of customers, experiment the new way to optimize customer experience. Assuming that every problem has multiple solutions and ask yourself and others for “three ways we might address the issue,” in order to push for multiple solutions via pulling the necessary resource. A digital organization is a living business in the relationship with its environments, customers, suppliers, and above all enhances and supports the creative human spirit via connecting, discovery, and experimentation.
Speed: Digital is about speed, lighter, but faster. The powerful technology and wisely usage of information can improve productivity, enforce collaboration, and innovate business solutions. However, in practice, even in the simplest organizations, the speed is not homogeneous across the enterprise; there are differences between “front office,” and “back office,” enterprises with multiple businesses and associated business models. So many organizations will have to “mix and match” at least two different speeds with appropriate management styles. IT plays a leading role in driving digitalization in the most advanced companies, hence, IT needs to focus on the fastest speed available, because that is where the main threat is to competitiveness, and the lightweight digital technologies do make IT nimble, ambidextrous, fast-responding, and adapt to changes.
IT maturity: IT maturity is based on overall business maturity. IT organizations can be either leading or supporting, depending on the maturity of the organization and the vision of top leaders. If the organization does not take advantage of, or expect the IT department to innovate and lead or initiate change, then in the age of the digital era, IT is unlikely to be delivering the best value for it customers and shareholders, and still get stuck in the lower level of maturity. Managing the variety of IT portfolio is an important step in improving digital maturity. Digital IT is dynamic, with a variety of teams to run the variety of IT portfolio, IT has to adapt to changes by continuous consolidation, simplification, integration, modernization, cloudification, innovation, and optimization. It takes holistic thinking and planning to treat projects the way and measure success of business projects as a whole, rather than keeping technology projects separate with silo thinking, and ensure that all business units required for the success of the project have requirement clearly defined with engaged stakeholders and senior business leaders.

Either running IT or managing the organization as a whole, being digitally ready goes beyond just applying the latest technologies or playing the trendy gadgets. IT management has to follow digital principles and take a structured approach to shifting from inside-out operation focus to outside-in customer-centric, and improve the overall maturity of the business. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu
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Published on November 11, 2016 23:20
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