The CIO’s Inquiries about IT Digital Readiness

It is at the tipping point that top performing companies see IT as an asset, capital, and source of competitive advantage.

With the exponential growth of information and continuous digital disruptions. Ideally, no matter which role IT plays to meet the needs of the organization at the different stage of the business lifecycle, it needs to remain indispensable because the enterprise's dependence on IT will only increase. Leading CIOs should make an objective assessment of IT strength and weakness, managing company performance and maximizing business potential. Here are three CIO’s inquiries about IT digital readiness.

Are you comfortable to swim in the sea of information? Information and technology catalyze today's digital businesses. IT plays a critical role in processing, retrieving, and refining information and abstracts the business insight and foresight from it. IT Systems are the backbone and provide valuable information for key decision making. Information brings about business ideas; business ideas generate lots of information. Information and knowledge are path-dependent. Information can either enforce cognitive understanding or sometimes misleading or cause distraction due to incomplete information or false knowledge. Therefore, the effectiveness of information management directly impacts on the performance, responsiveness, and maturity of the business. Information is more complex, intangible and dynamic compared to the physical asset; in fact, besides people, information is the most invaluable asset and investment in the organization nowadays. Keep in mind, managing information and knowledge is not just a technological problem, but a human problem. IT must be comfortable to swim in the sea of information and manage information as the corporate asset holistically and skillfully.

Can you handle concurrency and simultaneity to create synergy via cross-functional communication & collaboration? The very characteristics of digital dynamic are velocity, hyperconnectivity, complexity, uncertainty, and interdependence. Organizations today should be able to create the synergy which is just the business term for a desirable emergent property. Synergy creation also implies how to build the dynamic business capability via certain business activities or process tuning for handling concurrency and simultaneity. It requires that the business can take a dynamic planning process with continual attention to current changes and emerging events in the organization and its external environment, and how this affects the future of the business. The dynamic planning process is a continuous cycle; that's part of the management process itself. And then, the responsibility of the management is to make a seamless alignment of planning and implementation. The key is to engage the whole organization in knowing and understanding the direction and planning of the business, handle concurrency and simultaneity, create synergy via cross-functional communication & collaboration, build the momentum and increase the tempo of digital management.

Can you exhibit the IT-enabled business competence to thrive from the inevitable eruptions and constant uncertainties of the business dynamic? Organizations rely more and more on technology, and the IT department has more and more to overcome. Information and technology catalyze today's digital businesses. IT plays an important role in interpreting business issues into technical solutions and building IT-enabled business competency. This requires a cross-functional business paradigm for managing and operating IT/technology to improve operations, optimize cost, increase revenues, and drive all sort of innovation, proactively push ideas on how to leverage technology to catalyze revenue growth, increase business productivity and flexibility and solve business problems innovatively. Organizations must develop their own set of differentiated business competency in which IT is the linchpin to stay compatible and evolve in a synchronous manner with its environment, in order to thrive from inevitable eruptions and constant uncertainties of the business dynamic.

It is at the tipping point that top performing companies see IT as an asset, capital, and source of competitive advantage. IT leaders intellectual inquiries and comprehensive check up list help them develop the stepwise IT roadmap, make IT investment wisely and improve IT organizational maturity continually. The ultimate success of IT should be evaluated on how IT is able to deliver innovative products/services or supply a differentiated solution that contributes to both top line growth and the bottom line success of the organization.

Posted in: CIO Leadership,CIO Master,IT Transformation