How Coherent are your IT Enabled Digital Capabilities

IT plays a pivotal role in leading digital transformation at many forward-thinking organizations today, and IT strategy is an integral component of the corporate level digital strategy. A digital strategy has a purpose of driving customer engagement and experience as a cross-functional responsibility. Thus, the digital strategy needs to look outward with outside-in perspective; but the issue is that most IT departments look inward. So how effective does IT enable the business growth, and how coherent is your IT enabled digital capability?
What’s the current IT maturity and capability? What things are in place that will enable the business strategy? What can be done to strengthen them? What things are in place that will inhibit or endanger the business strategy? What can be done to minimize them? Are the right skills in place? Are costs in line with the long term ( five-year) plan and short term goals? Information strategy is a complex domain. The best approach requires to take some leaps of faith setting the right things in motion, and delicately balancing and rebalancing the results toward urgent, but hard to predict outcomes. IT is an important component of many differentiated business capabilities, for example, it includes establishing a data analytics capability, or organizational change capability, operational capability, etc. The constraint is in getting all of the systems up to a current technology to snap into an enterprise information strategy. The other main obstacle is getting everyone to agree on what is necessary and what the information lifecycles should be. A comprehensive set of enterprise-wide information management capability-Enables better data access and analysis by breakdown the silos. -Reduces costs and increases efficiencies.-Increases IT alignment and engagement with the business.
What is the organization's capacity for change? Is IT often the force to drive the changes, or the obstacle to stifle changes? If radical changes are needed, does the change management structure exist internally to deliver on that? And does the organization have the multifaceted capability to manage changes? When the need for significant change is identified, it's generally naive to think it will succeed without transformation as well. IT can help weave all these important business elements such as process and digital technology & tools into the building blocks of change capability and highlight the characteristics of “Changeable Organization” such as flexibility, agility, and innovation. IT at the low level of maturity reacts to the business changes with slow speed, or even turns to be the very obstacle for changes. However, the high mature IT organizations are at an inflection point to lead organizational level digital transformation because it is at the unique position to oversight business processes and processes underpin business capabilities. IT is also the “superglue” for orchestrating the business capabilities that the organization needs to build, and the ones that the organization needs to preserve to be capable of executing the strategy.
What’s the overall organizational capability and maturity? Generally speaking, a capability is an ability that an organization, person, or system possesses. Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of organization, people, processes, and technology to achieve. The enterprise consists of a set of capabilities. The organization then uses these capabilities to understand the markets / environment, create new products and services and then deliver products and services. The capability is the ability to achieve the desired effect under specified (performance) standards and conditions through combinations of ways and means (activities and resources) to perform a set of activities. The business is then designed around the experience. Capability can "contain" many services, processes, and functionality in which IT as one of the most critical element in weaving them together and building them up. In any case to monitor or seek disruptive opportunities requires businesses’ transformational capability with agility to adapt to changes. Therefore, IT capabilities directly make impact on business capabilities, and IT maturity is proportional with overall organizational maturity.
IT or digital strategy is not the sole domain of CIOs, it is collective efforts of IT and other business departments deciding in line with the strategy and in the interest of the organization. The stepwise scenario includes: creating the strategy, aligning all your companies’ assets toward common objectives. The next step is defining intermediate goals that work towards achieving those objectives. The varying organizational goals such as innovation, process efficiency, increased employee productivity, or customer delight through information are well worth investing time in creating. And the cohesive IT enabled digital capabilities improve organizational agility and maturity. Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu