Monday, August 1, 2016

The Digital IT Manifesto

The mantra of digital IT is doing more with innovation.

IT transformation is an integral part of the business digital transformation. In short, it means, whatever the driver, understanding the "As is" position of the business and the role IT plays in it and identifying the desirable "To be" state. The next step is to build and execute a strategy. IT transformation is the journey to pursue business agility, enable operational excellence, catalyze innovation, delight customer experience, and optimize employee satisfaction. What's the digital IT manifesto to leap effectiveness, agility, and maturity?

“Designed to Change”: Traditional IT organizations are static, expect Built to Last.” But with "VUCA" characteristics, Digital IT needs to be dynamic, IT transformation seeks to change. The word "transformation" in itself means change and change for the better, take new ways and methods of doing things with new structures and new relationships, etc.

“Doing more with innovation”: The mantra of traditional IT is “Doing more with less.” Digital is the age of innovation. Hence, IT transformation means doing more with innovation, transparency, and discipline. A transformation might need work cross boxes instead of within the box. IT has to enforce cross-functional communication and collaboration to harness its innovativeness.

“Being effective -Doing the right things,” before ”being efficient - doing things right”:  Traditional IT mainly focuses on improving efficiency -keep the lights on. IT Transformation means doing the “Right” things. A transformation needs strategic guidelines and policies. It takes greater transparency, trust, and collaboration leveraging repeatable process, expectation management and support from C-Level peers and buy-in from staff is also equally important.

“Being a business’s strategic partner,” not just “the support center or service provider”: IT transformation means rationalizing the current IT department, and planning to partner with the business to provide business solutions in new ways. IT as a business ‘Solutionary’ should understand how the organization works and then give solutions that will increase the functionality to lower cost. IT provides a progressive technology-driven business solution, from business enabler to digital transformer, helps to shape up the high-performance organization in today's hyper-competitive environment.

“Focusing on building core business capabilities”: Traditional IT organizations spends a significant amount of time to “fixing the symptoms and keep the bottom line.” But digital IT is a critical driver in building business capability and overall competency. IT transformation leverages business “core capabilities.” to achieve business goals with clear ownership and accountability at all levels. IT needs to build up a new set of core capabilities in transforming itself and business as a whole.

Transformation is simply a popular battle cry of change agents (leadership, business case, habit, etc.) to fix a supposed or real problem with the current state of an IT area or department. Transformations are generally associated with high-cost projects around risk, availability, business enablement, or sourcing. The key driver is often dissatisfaction with current IT performance or cost. IT helps to integrate/optimize/orchestrate business processes to facilitate the business outcome, and build an effective digital ecosystem.

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