Monday, May 29, 2017

Three Aspects of IT Led Digital Transformation

IT is impacting every business unit and is becoming the driver of business change and digital transformation.


Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing businesses, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. To stay competitive, companies must go beyond just experimenting with some digital technologies and commit to transforming themselves into a fully digital business powerhouse. IT also plays a pivotal role in leading a digital transformation in their organizations. Because IT oversees business processes, it can help to weave all these important business elements such as people, underlying processes, and functions into the building blocks of business capabilities and manage the business strategy effectively. Here are three aspects of IT led digital transformation.


The digital CIO is a business conductor: Organizations are living in the digital sea today, you have to change with the "tide." To refresh IT leadership, CIOs should be able to look ahead and the relevance of certain trends in its industry may indicate. Business has three fundamental pillars: People, process, and technology. The role of modern CIO is to identify and blend the ways that information and technology can assist and shape the business by linking all digital aspects together to enforce the business value creation. CIO must find the connection with the business in order to deliver the tailored business solution. IT is no longer just the background music as a support function only, it has to play its own music sheet and conduct the digital symphony. In order to be an effective Digital CIO, you must understand every aspect of the business and connect the effective dots between IT and business. CIOs as Chief Insight Officer, 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. IT can help to weave all important business ingredients to create products and processes which generate differentiated value for the business’s long-term growth, and then the term of business values can be measurable in dollars, culture, customer satisfaction, quality, etc.

IT is impacting every business unit and is becoming the driver of business change and digital transformation: Due to the exponential growth of information and “disruptive power” of digital technologies, organizations must continue to build its IT-enabled business competency to stay compatible and evolve in a compatible manner with its environment. The digital competency IT helps the business build 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. Organizations need both an internal as well as external focus when it comes to staying up to date with advances in technology. In order to survive and thrive amid rapid changes, companies must reclaim the right balance of standardization and innovation, process and flexibility;  stability and change, competition and collaboration, etc. And the management must share the holistic view of a living digital organization that promotes deep understanding of core processes, risks, and transformational opportunities, in order to accelerate digital transformation seamlessly.

Leverage IT in building business competency: Today, the emerging digital technology is the most important element in the new breed of digital capabilities which are rigor, but not rigid, standardized, but not monolithic; it can be built dynamically to adapt to changes more seamlessly. Business today need to provide or utilize systems and technologies that will facilitate the delivery of changes. The challenge of organizations is to manage its portfolio of cross-border organizational capacities and capabilities with an appropriate mix of enabling business elements, engaging digital talents to achieve business effectiveness, high-performance, and speed. Information and technology are also the catalyzers for digital innovation. Innovation happens because of specific business needs. Innovation happens at the intersection of people and technology. Unique challenges become more appear as businesses push the limits of the available technology, which pushes talented people to find a better solution to the problem on hand. Digital businesses become more dynamic and hyperconnected, organizations have to enable the desirable emergent property, either being called synergy or differentiated competency such as innovation. Although you can’t build key business capability overnight, digital organizations need to make it a continuous effort; so IT is not just the sum of services or processes, but an integrator which can weave all necessary elements of the business into strategic capabilities to improve the overall performance of the organization.

At the high maturity level, organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation, in order to adapt to the new business dynamic. IT is no longer just a reactive support function only, but a change organization that keeps information flow, enables business growth, builds business competency, and drives digital transformation.



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