Five Pitfalls to Fail IT

IT plays a more significant role in the organization than ever, because  information is pervasive, permeating into everywhere in a contemporary business today, and the speed of change is increasing, IT is a critical element in improving business agility to adapt to changes.  However, it doesn’t mean it is an easy job to run a high-performing IT organization. What are the pitfalls to fail IT, and how to overcome them in running a high-effective IT organization?
Overpromise, and under delivery: IT project priority is critical for many organizations, because most of IT organizations are still at the lower level of maturity, being perceived as a cost center, slow response to business’s request, spend most of the resources on “keeping the light on.”  It’s a department usually under-budget, overloaded with the projects assignment, and with a reputation on over-promise and under-delivery. Many IT leaders cite mistakes in managing the demand pipeline, either by not setting the right priorities well with the business units, or just taking on too much and crushing their team. The major contributing factors to IT overloading are “ineffective leadership,”  "insufficient resources," “de-motivated teams,” and the classic “can’t say no.” Many times, IT leaders don’t have a seat at the big table to create the strategy or functional executives hold silo thinking and unhealthily compete for limited resources, thus, they can’t prioritize and assign limited resources wisely; or work collaboratively to plan, manage, govern and measure projects effectively.
Fail to engage users in IT transformation: Engaging and empowering your end user is vital. Particularly as business has become more tech-savvy, and as such, aware of their power to demand what they want, when and how they want it. Collaborate with customers and partners, as they are what makes or breaks a successful IT. IT needs to invent itself in a very entrepreneur fashion.With the startup world growing as fast as they are, the disruption of IT will continue. How to re-imagine customer-centricity by going through the change and IT transformation. It is the smart business leader who takes control of business strategy and leverages IT tools and technologies to meet targets incorporated in 'said' strategy.
“Lost in translation” symptom: The mistake that most organizations make in business communication is to fail to translate the high-level language of strategy into the professional language of the various staff specialisms. Strategy communication has to be customized from general management background to technical background employees. Ultimately a strategy has to end up expressed in people's job descriptions and workloads. Engineers have engineering language, marketers have marketing language, etc. But the highly effective business leaders and strategists are business “multi-linguist” who can master at different business dialects and convey the right message to tailor different audiences.
High IT project failure rate: IT project failure can damage business overall capability and even brand reputation to serve end customers for the long term. Project failure is due to poor  management, complexity, and business participation. The root causes of failure can be broken down into the culture, politics, expertise, policy and technology categories. More specifically,  IT Project fail because 1) Project management by IT is weak 2) IT project are generally system projects; they cover multiple elements, the main problem is that IT effort is to get the individual elements to work but never to get the different elements to work well together 3). IT project focuses on capability and not effectiveness.
Lack of effective IT leadership: Business transformation needs to start at and be led by the top of the organization. What needs to change and why? CIOs need to capture the full picture, the holistic business insight, rather than IT picture only. They should educate other business functions with data that business as whole is superior to the sum of pieces.  CIOs can also provide valuable insight in the form of money saved, revenue from new unexplored business idea etc., at the same time, CIO should collect feedback from the business upon how to improve IT services & satisfy customers. They can deliver ‘competitive capability” to business as many businesses will plateau without IT, so there is a co-dependency that should be recognized in a mature - respectful manner that facilitates the strategic goals and objectives of the enterprise. Leaders must clearly articulate that message to their organization so managers and employees can actually execute it. Most successful CIOs have a good balance of technology and business. It doesn’t so matter where the CIO comes from as long as he or she understands the mission: to drive the business growth and improve IT maturity.
IT is the key component in building up differentiated business capabilities nowadays. To avoid these potential pitfalls. IT needs to attribute business value to your company in building close companionship with your business peers, customers, and partners, grow high effective IT leadership, also in developing multi-dimensional views of KPIs that show how IT is improving business and enforcing business capabilities.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu