The New Book “Digital IT - 100 Q&As” Chapter VI Digital IT Priority Q&As

Modern businesses often get trapped into “busyness,” overwhelmed with too many projects or change initiatives, and overloaded with short-term business concerns. Hence, it is important to set the right priority for improving management effectiveness and maturity. Prioritization starts with a right mindset, to laser focuses on the most critical challenge the business needs to overcome and spur healthy debates on how to manage the business resource and talent effectively via prioritization and optimization.
How to manage and prioritize business requirement for IT initiatives? IT is business, every IT initiative needs to have a well-defined business requirement and well-supported business sponsors. The requirement management is a good starting point and one of the significant steps in managing IT initiative effectively to achieve its business value. IT initiative are business projects, and therefore, require participation by the entire business. As requirements are gathered, managed, and discussed with executives and teams, focus on those requirements whose improvement has the most benefit to the business, and keep the stakeholders focused on those requirements and relationships. So IT has to oversee the full set of the requirements to ensure the cohesiveness and to determine all the customers, users, and stakeholders, and obtain their involvement. The challenging is really about helping the sponsors, being able to ask the right questions and fitting together different strategy components. The business requirement management directly impacts on how successful such initiatives can not only be delivered on time or on a budget, but, more importantly, on value, and reach customers’ expectations.
What are the prioritization challenges for CIOs to run high performance IT? IT is the only function in an organization which has the touch point with all other functions and provides the necessary integration between them through efficient business processes and information systems. CIOs need to have information technology insight and foresight upon potential opportunities to retool business, reimagine growth possibilities and manage innovation effectively. IT plays a significant role in modern businesses to ensure the right people can get the right information at the right time to make the right decisions for either business problem-solving or customer delight. IT is often understaffed and overloaded, in order to gain respect from the business and build a good reputation as a trustful business partner for the long term, it is both the art and science to know when to say “Yes,” and when to say “No,” to your internal customers, IT needs to act as the trustful business partner to advise the business for figuring out the better solution, not just the customer asking for. The challenge for running high performance IT is to set the right priority, manage the limited budget and resource, to “Do more with innovation,” acquire and deploy appropriate technologies and services to achieve significant business goals and objectives.
How to set the right priority for running digital IT with full speed? IT plays a significant role in the digital transformation of the organization because information is permeating into every corner of the business and digital technologies are often the disruptive forces of digital innovation. However, the majority of IT organizations still get stuck in the lower level of maturity, slow to change, and operate in a “surviving mode.” IN some well-established organizations, IT is the controller with a bit “arrogant” attitude, without doing enough to engage the business into collecting requirement and setting priority.  Hence, IT leaders need to have the strategic mind and skillset to contribute to both business problem defining and solving. IT should play as an optimistic innovator and a cautious digital accelerator, with an in-depth understanding of technology potential and limitation, opportunity, and risks. The CIO can only set the right priority choice and speed up to drive changes if they have the information available to them and proactively understand business and customer first to avoid changing for the technology’s sake. So IT can run with full speed without too many distractions and misunderstanding.
There is no one size fits all formula to run a high-effective IT with accelerated speed. Because different IT organizations evolve digital with the different speed, and the enterprise as a whole is at the different stage of reaching business maturity. By setting the right priority and focusing resources and budget on the most critical areas, IT has the opportunity to not only be responsive but ultimately be strategic partner capable of helping lines of businesses thrive by proactively driving digital transformation.

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