The New Book “Digital IT - 100 Q&As” Chapter V Digital IT Potential Q&As

Due to increasing speed of changes and overwhelming growth of information, forward-looking organizations across industrial sectors claim they are in the information management businesses, and there is a high expectation of IT to drive changes and lead the digital transformation. Hence, how to spur healthy debates for brainstorming how to run an innovative IT organization, how can IT contribute to customer acquisition and retention? How to run digital IT as a revenue rainmaker? And the payoff of IT digital transformation is not just for the quick win, but to build the long-term business competency.



Why is the CIO struggle to run IT as a better business partner: Traditional IT organizations are often run in the reactive mode, overloaded and understaffed, get stuck at the lower level of maturity. And IT leaders are perceived as the tech geek or tactical manager only. Digital CIOs have to enforce communication & collaboration with business partners and harness creativity. Without a clear strategy and a way to communicate it in the language of the business, CIOs will always have trouble getting even “aligned,” not mention of reaching the higher IT maturity level of proactively enabling and engaging with the business. The key challenge is to find a way so that both sides, even though they speak different languages can communicate effectively. CIOs must position themselves as the mentor to the business. They must have a higher level of influence on how businesses changes; for CIOs to be invited into the boardroom, they need to speak to the business about the strategic imperative of the organization.The true IT-business partnership is of course built over time, experiments more creative common language to communicate. As “lost in translation” is the key issue to separate IT from the business. It is worth the effort to take better communication approaches and be both creative and critical in enforcing business and IT collaboration. Business and IT have to work together to achieve their common goals and bring the long-term business results.
Should and how can IT get more engaged in revenue generating initiatives: Historically, IT has been perceived as a back office, a cost center, a technology controller, not an enabler. Now, with the accelerating speed of change and the consumerization of IT, IT needs to become an innovation engine and the driver of business growth. IT can drive the business, but it should be in conjunction with the business. Otherwise, IT will be seen as in competition with the business. IT has two sets of customers: the end customers IT can directly or indirectly serve or influence and the internal customers IT always works with. IT is the key ingredient of any competitive business capabilities, and IT can optimize the touch point of customers’ life experience. As always, IT also needs to work closely with internal customers to improve business operation. IT must partner with the respective business units to derive and deliver business strategies that are enabled or driven by IT. Also, more and more CIOs are taking on responsibilities outside of the IT domain, and in some cases with direct revenue generating responsibilities. If CIOs are perceived as business executives, they should be able to demonstrate revenue generating expertise.
How to run a future-driven IT organization to catalyze growth: Traditional IT organizations spend a significant amount of time to “fixing the symptoms and keep the bottom line.” The future-driven IT needs to spend a significant amount of time on strategy management and innovation. IT is no longer just the tangible hardware boxes which are heading into the commodity, the future of IT is more about the intangible information fabric with digital lightweight technologies interwoven into your organization. IT needs to build up the new set of core capabilities in transforming itself and business as a whole. The future-driven IT is an innovation solution provider to help organizations deliver the best-tailored products or solutions to its end customers. The future-driven IT steps out of the traditional IT box, to understand the business and customers better via longer time frame; focuses on building core business capabilities to catalyze growth and improve overall business competency. The future-driven IT organizations need to continually fine-tune a successful structure to improve customer-centricity as well. The challenge for any business is to find a successful, often the hybrid structure that helps to empower people, enforce iterative communication, and cross-functional collaboration to deliver the better business result.
IT needs to shift from inside-out operation driven to outside-in customer centric. IT can become known as a revenue rainmaker by associating its efforts directly with sources of income. To unleash IT as well as the entire organization’s digital potential, CIOs have to be an integral part of the top leadership team for driving business value, bring technology vision in strategy making. IT leaders have to be hand-in-glove with the other business executives to map out the vision, put the framework in place to map the strategic objective into KPIs and then determine what technology investments will accelerate the changes and improve business profits, and IT needs to become the business catalyst, rather than just a supporting function.
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