Saturday, November 12, 2016

The CIO's Digital Agenda: Five Big “Why”s in IT Digital Transformation Nov. 2016

Debating is not for stimulating conflicts, but for brainstorming better ways to do things.

Due to the changing nature of technology, IT leadership role also continues to involve and shift the focus, to move up the maturity level. More and more CIOs are requested to take more responsibility and many CIOs present the breadth of leadership competency. The proactive IT debates help IT leaders to brainstorm innovative and better ways to do things, and improve management capabilities. Here are the monthly CIO debates collections for Nov, 2016.

       Five Big “Why”s in IT Digital Transformation

  • Why is IT so Reluctant to Look at itself?  With the rate of change is accelerated, it’s very important for contemporary organizations to continually do “self-reflection’ upon the business effectiveness, process efficiency, strength and risks, culture and brand etc. IT is a critical component of the business, commonly IT self-evaluation ability is a reflection on overall business culture within the whole organization. Some say IT is so reluctant to look at itself, is it true?


  • IT Skills Gap: Why does it happen and how to Fill it? Due to the changing nature of technology and accelerating speed of business changes, among the most pervasive and persistent concerns or complaints from IT leaders is the skills gaps, such as their people do not have the right competencies; they can’t find the right skills to fill the positions or their non-IT partners do not understand IT, etc. Are such problems an organization specific, or systematic? And how to mind the gaps and achieve business goals?


  • Why IT Doesn’t Get Respected? IT seems to be always at the paradoxical position, on one hand, technology is omnipresent, touch every corner of enterprise, on the other hand, many IT organizations earn very little respect from business peers, why, and how to turn around?


  • Why Has IT Been Perceived as the ‘Weakest Link’ ? IT plays a more important role in the digital transformation of the organization. It is the superglue to connect both the hard elements of the business such as processes, platforms, technologies and soft elements of the organization such as information, knowledge,  culture and integrate them into a set of business capabilities, which underpin the business strategy. However, there is the perception gap between IT looks at itself and the business perceives IT. IT is often seen itself as a business enabler and change agent, but business often thinks that IT is slower to change, and even be one of the “weakest links” for the business transformation. So why is IT not getting enough respect despite all good work and huge efforts were undertaken? Where does it link to improve IT brand? To deal with such a "He said, she said" dilemma: What are the different perspectives from each party, how to integrate them into a holistic IT view and reinvent the tarnished IT reputation?


  • Application Rationalization & Modernization: Why is Sun Never Set? Most information technology (IT) departments split their time between implementing new and maintaining existing technology. On the software side, most of the focus are on applications supporting business processes. A new application is usually intended to replace an outdated (legacy) application. However, both will typically run in production until the new application is proven, after which the legacy application is obsolesced (no longer used) and sunset (no longer maintained, usually removed). At least, in theory, that is how it is all supposed to work.  However, in practice, legacy applications are rarely sunset. Why??

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