Wednesday, May 24, 2017

CIOs as Chief Insight Officer: How to Leverage IT to Improve Digital Maturity

Organizations must leverage the emergent digital trends and the latest technologies to design, build, scale, and optimize competency and improve business maturity continuously and systematically.

Digital make a significant impact on every aspect of the business. The multidimensional digital effects provide impressive advantages in term of the speed of delivery and unprecedented business opportunities & risks. A digital organization can bring greater awareness of business ecosystem intricacies and the systemic perspective of organizational structure, business process, people dynamics, resource alignment, or technological touches. The challenge is to have a harmonized vision of organizational strategy, capabilities, and business maturity. CIOs as Chief Insight Officer: How to leverage IT to build digital competency and improve digital maturity?

Identify and prioritize emergent digital opportunities timely: The unprecedented opportunities brought by digital technologies and increasing the speed of change can lift up a fast growing business promptly, also reinvent a well-established organization to reach the next level of the business growth. There may be many elements of digital competency that are foundational to almost any foreseeable digital strategy so implementing them could be viewed as a valid preparatory first step in readiness for a strategic opportunity when it is recognized. Because the inevitable digital disruptions can ruin the brand image of a well-established organization almost overnight. Hence, a company must leverage IT and encompass all of the relevant disciplines in place and actively monitoring opportunities & risks in order to recognize and act on them in a time frame that will yield strategic advantage. Forward-thinking digital organizations today need to constantly adapt to the ever-changing environment, improve business competency, and seeing the digital transformation as an opportunity while keeping a holistic overview of the business are the core messages of the digital transformation.

Dealing with fast-paced and ongoing change effortlessly: A changeable organization is to creating organizations where change is the norm (though not for its own sake) and happens the whole time thereby delivering faster and increasing market share. Change cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished. It has to be woven into communication, process, and action of the organization. Change Management shouldn’t be just an isolated effort, but an ongoing core business competency. The issues that will prevent change from happening are likely to be the leadership vision, communication, internal politics, current culture/blame, poorly aligned systems/processes/technology, too much hierarchy or centralization. The trick is also to find the balance between change direction control and real involvement of the affected employees. Change is a dance between top management and the affected parts of the organization where it must be clear who is responsible for what part of the change. The roadblocks to change include, but not limited to lack of direction. In today's work environment, it takes a lot of energy to break habits and outdated processes, but change is happening at a more rapid pace. If you make change part of your routine, then change becomes easier to deal with.

Managing information and technology effectively: Nowadays, every organization claim they are in the information management business. IT is the core competency. Foresightful business leaders are increasingly looking to the IT function to introduce beneficial change into their business models to improve strategic performance, enforce customer intelligence and to position the enterprise for future industry leaders, etc.  In a digital business environment where change is constantly happening, that handicaps the organization, the emerging digital organizations should leverage digital technologies and tools in enforcing holistic strategic planning, cross-functional collaboration, and dynamic processes management. The aim of modern Information Management has often been described as getting the right information to the right person, in the right format and medium, at the right time, in order to make the right decisions. The leading IT organizations now explore the consumer based model -running faster, nimble and resilient, with digital speed.  Digital IT is a business conductor in knitting all important business factors, to improve business changeability, responsiveness, agility, flexibility, and maturity.

Building business competency systematically: Organizations are living in the digital sea today, you have to change with the "tide," but you also have to follow the well-defined principles which would guide you in decisions and how you relate to others, with which speed can you swim in the uncharted water, what competency helps you survive and thrive, and how to laser focus on the destination without getting lost. Organizations must continue to build its business competency in which IT is the linchpin to stay compatible and evolve in a compatible manner with its environment. The digital competency they should craft is about adapting, optimizing, innovating, and improving business maturity, to achieve the desired effect under specified performance standards and conditions through combinations of talents and resources, processes, and technologies to perform a set of activities. An accelerating digital IT separates the exploitation of the existing methods and technologies from the exploration of the new way to do things via leveraging the emergent digital trends to design, build, scale, and optimize business competency and improve business maturity continuously and systematically.

High mature organizations are moving solidly from doing digital via applying digital technologies only to going digital and being digital via expanding digital both horizontally and vertically, across all business dimensions, to optimize underlying functions and processes, building business competency, improving both organizational flexibility and strategic responsiveness, and reach the high level of digital maturity.

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