Wednesday, October 11, 2017

CIOs as Chief Investment Officer: Three Aspects to Unleash IT Enabled Digital Potential

Assessing organizational personality, managing company performance and maximizing business potential are important digital management scenarios to build the high-mature digital organization.

All ambitious businesses strive to unlock their business potential. Performance keeps the business lights on, the potential could enable the organization to reach the next level of business growth cycle and maturity. Nowadays, technology is the disruptive force behind digital transformation and information is the gold mine all forward-thinking businesses are digging in, and companies across the industrial sectors claim they are in the information management business. CIOs as “Chief Investment Officer”: How to unleash IT-enabled digital potential?
The business potential is about future performance, not past performance: Re-imaging the future of business is exciting, reinventing the business to get digital ready takes both bold leadership and strategic planning, investigating the different path for unleashing business potential needs to take a systematic approach and develop it into a more solid form. The emergent digital technologies are lightweight and more powerful to improve business efficiency, increase employee productivity, foster collaboration and enforce innovation. The value of information is a crucial success factor to run a real-time highly intelligent business today. Thus, the IT investment in the business can often become the decisive factor to run a high-performance organization with a long-term perspective. With the fast pace of changes, there is a danger of not having a proper management process to "develop and nurture" business potential and performance. Thus, CIOs as “Chief Investment Officer” should leverage strategic thinking and systems thinking, the thought process, behavior, and outcome need to be assessed cohesively, to truly understand the full potential of the business. They should be able to convey a clear message to the board and top executive teams in looking and appreciating IT strategic benefits to the business, with a calculated estimation of the loss if IT was not used to achieve the strategy. On the other side, considering many businesses which make a huge investment in sophisticated technology tools that are greatly wasted, because the appropriate processes to leverage those tools are not implemented or adopt, CIOs need to be well grounded in first and foremost corporate governance principles and frameworks, improve IT operational transparency, and ensure that IT investment gets the right ROI to satisfy shareholders and benefit customers.


Potential relates to the innate and developed capability: Either at the individual or business level, performance is mostly a mix of past and present; and potential relates to the innate and developed capability. The business needs to discover its strength and build its differentiated competency based on the well-balanced digital capability portfolio. In the digital era, information potential directly impacts the business's potential of the organization. The information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses, thus, the value of information is not isolated. To unleash IT-enabled digital potential, CIOs need to first work to identify how information is associated with valued tangibles of the businesses, products, and resources, like information flow in processes. And then its own value will become readily apparent and quantifiable by association. Business potential includes the ability to perform in the future and that’s what really matters when you have to make information-based decisions. The art and science of Information Management are to optimize its usage, achieve business value, develop business capabilities, and unleash the full potential of the digital organization.  


The potential is an investment, improving revenue and catalyzing business growth: IT can either make or break a company even overnight nowadays. IT management is about applying technology to lower costs, improve operations, and increase revenue. IT needs to be understood and harnessed by all stakeholders to fulfill the business potential. The potential is realized via wise investments. IT is roughly coupled with the business strategy, IT strategy now becomes an integral component of business strategy. IT needs to be telling the business about the opportunities and possibilities and that means IT needs to really understand the goals of the business. IT leaders should become the business advisor, and make sure that the executive team first understands what it needs to drive future business growth via unlocking the business potential, put the framework in place to map the strategic objectives into performance management. The ambitious companies empower their IT because digital IT can drive all sorts of innovations, proactively push ideas on how to leverage technology to drive revenue growth, increase business productivity, flexibility and maturity. IT and business should work closely to assess performance and potential benefit from IT investment portfolio, the ROI calculations should be a joint undertaking, measure and then determine what IT investments will accelerate the changes you want to see in your performance indicators.


Assessing organizational personality, managing company performance and maximizing business potential are important digital management scenarios to build up a positive business working environment, develop the trustful relationship, enforce relentless communication, foster seamless collaboration, inspire creativity, pursue business excellence, improve employee satisfaction and accelerate digital transformation.


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