100 IT Charms: Running Versatile IT to get Digital Ready

By Pearl Zhu

With the increasing pace of changes and overwhelming growth of information, technology is often the disruptive force of digital transformation, and information is one of the most time intensive pieces of innovation puzzles. Modern IT has many faces. There are very progressive organizations in which IT sparks organizational creativity. Running digital IT is both science and art. The success of IT transformation is not random; there are cohesive efforts behind IT magic.

The purpose of the book “100 IT Charms: Running Versatile IT to get Digital Ready“ is to articulate different flavors of digital IT organizations and brainstorm the best and next practices for running highly innovative and high-performance IT. Digital charm is not based on the style presented on the surface but on a set of unique competencies to make IT shine through as a business differentiator.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359716135

Book preview

100 IT Charms: Running Versatile IT to get Digital Ready

100 IT Charms

Running Versatile IT to get Digital Ready

Pearl Zhu

Copyright @2019 Pearl Zhu

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means –whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic –without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punished by law.

ISBN: 978-0-359-71613-5

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 IT as Business Driver

Chapter 2 IT as an Information Broker

Chapter 3 Strategic IT

Chapter 4  Change Agent IT

Chapter 5 IT as the Center of Possibility

Chapter 6 People - Centric IT Organization

Chapter 7 Competitive IT

Chapter 8 IT as Problem-Solving Master

Chapter 9 High-Performance IT

Chapter 10 IT as Digital Accelerator

Acknowledgment

About the Author

Introduction

Modern IT has many faces. Understanding the element of art in digital IT is the first step for achieving the art of possible.

We have more computing power, hyper-connectivity, overwhelming growth of information, and greater potential empowerment of digital workforce, etc. Digital power is the combination of the power of knowledge, the power of information and technology, the power of people, and the power of creativity.

With the increasing pace of changes and overwhelming growth of information, technology is often the disruptive force of digital transformation, and information is one of the most time intensive pieces of innovation puzzles. Modern IT has many faces. There are very progressive organizations in which IT sparks organizational creativity. Running digital IT is both science and art. The success of IT transformation is not random; there are cohesive efforts behind IT magic.

The purpose of the book "100 IT Charms: Running Versatile IT to get Digital Ready" is to articulate different flavors of digital IT organizations and brainstorm the best and next practices for running highly innovative and high-performance IT. Digital charm is not based on the style presented on the surface but on a set of unique competencies to make IT shine through as a business differentiator.

Figure 1 100 IT Charms Chapter Introduction

Chapter 1 IT as a Business Driver: At today’s information-driven business dynamic, to reinvent IT for getting digital ready, the IT organization has to move forward from a reactive order taker and a back office support function to a strategic business partner and digital catalyst. It is important to run a business-driven IT organization with dynamic, iterative, integral, and interactive digital flow and manage the business continuum by following a set of well-defined digital principles and taking interdisciplinary management practices.

Chapter 2 IT as Information Broker: Nowadays information is the lifeblood of the organization, all forward-thinking organizations across industrial sectors declare they are in the information management business. IT needs to shift from T - technology driven to I - information, insight, and innovation oriented. The CIO role needs to be elevated to the information part of the definition and back to the basic as the title implies: Chief Information Officer.

Chapter 3 Strategic IT: With the fast-paced change, overwhelming growth of information and frequent digital disruptions often driven by technologies, IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. To make a smooth digital transformation, IT needs to shift from providing largely back-office support to becoming the strategic business partner for guiding digital transformation and driving changes proactively.

Chapter 4  Change Agent IT: Digital is about change. IT has become synonymous with the change department in forward-looking organizations. IT is in a unique position to oversee the whole organizational processes and should have the program skills to implement digital transformation successfully. Collectively, IT should cultivate a healthy change habit; Change Management needs to be the mechanism embedded in the multitude of IT management in order to run IT as a change agent.

Chapter 5 IT as the Center of Possibility: IT continues to grow in importance to organizations from different perspectives. To keep IT relevant, IT management shouldn't just practice some transactional activities or act as a controller only. It has to explore both the art and the science of digital management discipline, run IT organization as the center of possibility, to accelerate its performance and unlock the full digital potential.

Chapter 6 People-Centric IT: Traditional IT organizations are often inside-out operation-driven, mechanical and monolithic; digital IT needs to be run as an outside-in and people-centric organization to enchant customers, empower employees, evolve business partners, invite all sorts of business partners for feedback, and ensure the right people getting the right information at the right time to make the right decisions. To put simply, run IT as the people-centric organization.

Chapter 7 Competitive IT: IT plays a significant role in the digital paradigm shift. Digital CIOs must run a modern IT organization with core competency. The unprecedented opportunities brought by information and technologies and IT-enabled changeability can lift up a fast growing business promptly. It can also reinvent a well-established organization to reach the next level of the business growth cycle.

Chapter 8 IT as a Problem-Solver: Fundamentally, running a business is an iterative change and problem-solving continuum. With continuous disruptions and the exponential growth of information, the role of IT in the current business environment should be able to solve critical business problems and enable business outcomes in a structured way.

Chapter 9 High-Performance IT: The multidimensional digital transformation provides impressive advantages in terms of the speed of delivering business solutions and the impact on the way we think, live, and work nowadays. The priority for CIOs is to genuinely position IT as an integral and inseparable part of the business and run high-performance IT to get digital ready.

Chapter 10 IT as Digital Accelerator: With the increasing speed of changes and continuous digital disruptions, IT has to adapt to changes in faster and proactive way. More often than not, IT needs to drive changes and plays a pivotal role in the digital transformation by focusing on the fastest speed available because that is where the main threat to business competitors. It is about running IT as a business accelerator to catalyze growth and improve organizational speed.

With today’s business uncertainty and digital dynamic, the balance of art and science in IT is about how to leverage scientific discipline for problem-solving, as well as how to apply design thinking to make continuous efforts on building delightful products or services and improving the overall IT maturity. Digital IT leaders can't just sit back and apply yesterday’s logic or techniques to today's problems. The key is to get out of the comfort zone, engage with the business and make cross-functional collaboration seamlessly, take a unique path to explore new possibilities and become digital ready. The trick isn't about identifying new things, but culling through the hundreds of new things, and discovering those that can be used to continuous business betterment and improve the overall organizational maturity.

Chapter 1 IT as Business Driver

Running a business-driven digital IT organization means that IT can demonstrate its performance not from IT lens, but from outside-in business and customers’ perspective.

Figure 2 IT as Business Driver

At today’s information-driven business dynamic, IT continues to grow in importance to organizations both operationally and as a competitive advantage. To reinvent IT for getting digital ready, the IT organization has to move from a reactive order taker and a back office support function to a strategic business partner and digital catalyst. It is important to run a business-driven digital IT organization with dynamic, iterative, integral, and interactive digital flow and business continuum by following a set of well-defined digital principles and taking interdisciplinary management practices.

●       Information management fluency: Because the intrinsic value of information management is to tune information and knowledge assets of the business into corporately owned assets and improve business decision effectiveness and overall business competency. The epistemic value of information/knowledge management is to develop a highly professional knowledge workforce and cultivate the culture of learning and innovation. Information Management is the critical business process of aligning the application of information through cohesive management practices. Information flows into the company, gets stored, processed, refined, and hopefully flow to the customers of the company to ensure products/services delivery smoothly. Information is dynamic and knowledge needs to be updated all the time. On the flip side, information is also something that can hinder the achievement of strategic objectives, having it unavailable or compromised. If not properly managed, it becomes a worse case an organizational liability and at best case as the underutilized business asset. From Information Management perspective, running a business-driven digital organization means that the business has the rich flow of information, information has the right quality; information is applied properly, and information has been refined into business insight or customer foresight with the aim of solving tough business problems and improving organizational responsiveness and performance intellectually.

●       IT-business engagement: To run a business-driven digital IT organization, forward-looking companies are moving from reluctant business-IT alignment to proactive IT-business engagement stage. Put simply, running IT as the business means that IT can work as an integral part of the business to capitalize on growth opportunity and lead digital transformation seamlessly. It takes very concerted, dedicated, and structural efforts and a strong desire on both business and IT side to make it happen smoothly. More specifically, it means having IT and business collaborate as equal partners so that strategies, portfolios, structures, and people, etc, work in harmony such that initiatives, especially those focused on leveraging IT to increase revenues are successful. IT can drive the digital transformation but it should be in conjunction with the business. The cross-functional collaboration entails effective communication, governance, value analytics, partnership, information & technology fluency, and people skills. When IT is operated through an outside-in business lens, focus on solving both existing and emerging business problems, it is on the right track to get digital ready and build its reputation as the trustful business partner.

●       Strategic partnership: Due to the complex nature of technology and overwhelming growth of information, IT leaders have to build up the strong partnership both with business managers and other service providers within digital ecosystem to run a business-driven digital IT organization. The business will not just use IT as a digital extension but leverage IT across their organization to attain the enterprise-wide digital transformation. From the IT relationship management perspective, IT leaders need to check continually: Who will work with you to overcome problems or roadblocks? Who are your supporters and who are your detractors? Who are your partners and who are your competitors, or maybe both at a different situation? Internally, IT management and staff should learn to listen to the internal users and business partner’s pain points and develop a collaborative approach to co-solve common business issues. Externally, IT needs to build solid partnerships by managing a mixed bag of diversified vendors, multifaceted collaborations, co-ownership of ventures and companies, etc, across the digital ecosystem, and run in a very entrepreneur fashion to solve business problems effectively. The big leap through the strategic partnership establishment is to do more with innovation, modernize business models, and create significant opportunities for growing business and delighting customers continually.

Running a business-driven digital IT organization means that IT can demonstrate its performance not from IT lens, but from outside-in business and customer perspective. The priority for CIOs is to genuinely position IT as an integral and inseparable part of the business, develop IT that is flexible to accommodate rapidly changing business strategies and requirements, define core IT competencies, and refine IT reputation as the invaluable business partner.

1 Accelerate IT as Digital Growth Engine

Enterprise IT organizations are likely to be the winners on the whole if IT starts to plan and accelerate the digital transformation.

Figure 3 Accelerate IT as Digital Growth Engine

Information and technology are pervasive, business transformation or any business initiatives today nearly always involves some form of technology implementation and information-based insight as IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behaviors. Hence, forward-thinking companies have to empower their IT organizations to drive digital transformations. More specifically, which enterprise capabilities should IT build to deal with the emergent digital complexity with the new characteristics such as hyper-connectivity, hyper-density, and hyper-dynamism, to become a growth engine of a high-mature digital business?

●       Digital Innovation: IT needs to update its mantra from doing more with less, to doing more with innovation. Because information is the gold mine forward-looking businesses need to dig in for discovering the new growth opportunity, and emerging technology is the disruptive force behind the digital transformation. IT enables business innovation and creates value propositions that would move your prospects to become your clients; more importantly, improve customer retention. IT shifts to become more I focus: Innovation, Information, Intelligence, Integration, Improvement, and Interface, etc. There are numerous perceptions of IT guiding business in the right direction and delivering innovative services/solutions for either delighting customers or exploring new opportunities, with the goal to run a high innovative and high-competitive digital business.

●       Digital Intelligence: IT provides a nervous system to the business. Business needs IT to provide better quality and real-time information to achieve improved profitability. If intelligence built is poor or not managed in a proper way, it may lead to wrong decisions and hence impact on the business negatively. But if IT can capture business insight and foresight, the business would prosper and grow. It totally depends on a deep understanding of the business and implementing the strategic goals by leveraging IT tools and techniques. It means providing data which will help to dissect the trends and help business create great products, services, solutions, and ultimately, provide insight which will help to measure the value-add of what is delivered so that quick adjustments can be made to keep profits coming. One of the most important goals for running digital IT is to deliver precise, authentic, and on-time information to the business for making right decisions at the right time and make efficient use of all resources for running a high-intelligent and highly effective digital organization.

●       Digital Agility: Agility is the enterprise changeability. It’s is not only the ability to create the change but also the capability to adapt to changes. Agility within and of itself is a strategy. Business expects IT to figure out ways to make it agiler. IT is only increasing in importance and relevance with each passing day. Within IT, organizational agility should be defined as the speed in which the organization can enable the enterprise's goals and objectives. It allows the CIO to consider ways to drive high ROI, integrate services and any number of additional IT value-added components which can be provided. Digital agility means that the business is able to efficiently utilize limited capital for bringing quality products and services to the market at a faster speed. It means that IT-enabled digital agility can create efficiencies in the processes to enable business competing in terms of offering products and services for customer retention faster than competitors.

Enterprise IT organizations are likely to be winners on the whole if IT starts to plan and accelerate digital transformation. The importance of IT to the enterprise will increase due to the depth of their relationships with users throughout the enterprise and its unique position to oversee processes and structures. Running IT as the growth engine of the business, along with an effective strategy and measurable execution will achieve high-performance results and improve organizational competency.

2 IT as a Digital Business Catalyst

It’s not enough for IT to only focus on the bottom line keeping the lights on, it has to contribute more on business growth.

Digital organizations are hyperconnected, interdependent and always on, they have to continue to adapt to the digital new normal with VUCA characteristics. Nowadays, everything requires shorter term planning without giving up the strategic endgame. IT is more often the big influencer of business strategy and the creative driver of innovation because Information is the lifeblood and technology is often the digital disruptor. To further expedite digital transformation, how to run IT as a growth engine of the business?

●       IT leaders need to shift their management orientation and begin thinking like entrepreneurs: IT entrepreneurialism becomes a new fixture for management in their efforts to substantiate their competitive position, affect the market landscape, and drive new revenue growth. Practicing intrapreneurship in the large enterprise is the right way to reinvent IT as a growth engine of the business to build the culture of innovation. Today IT is the wing of every successful business. The paradigm shifts from IT being a reactive help desk and engine room culture to one that is agile and develops the capabilities to drive business growth and perpetual improvement. Profits and then ROI should be the driving force behind any IT project. IT department provides guidance, support, assistance and direction in the application and adoption of information technology solutions in support of business objectives! IT is the only entity in the organization supposed to understand business entirely, oversee organizational processes horizontally, and pays attention to change processes under the surface in order to build change as a crucial business capability via platform approaches and systematic disciplines. A great IT organization can differentiate its organization from the competitors by achieving the desired capability outcome. 

●       It’s not enough for IT to only focus on bottom line - keeping the lights on, it has to contribute more on the business growth: IT leaders need to encourage their teams to spend more time with leaders on the business side as well as directly with customers. Because running high-effective digital IT is about achieving the top-line business growth by maximizing ROI to add up overall business value. When maintaining a clear and efficient bottom line with enough forward thinking to plan in growth, this dimension allows the IT organization to manage information and apply technology to pour more on the top line. These engagements are leading IT to be much more proactive in proposing - as opposed to responding to ideas for new ways to improve customer services or actually create new customer value and revenue. Also, you have to have some measure to show what value was created. In order to show value, first, all parties need to agree on the common value proposition, and then, you need to be able to measure it. If you cannot, then you cannot show how much value was created or lost.

●       IT needs to rebrand itself as business innovation hub and digital transformation center: IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behavior. Technology is pervasive, Business Transformation or business initiatives today nearly always involves some form of technology implementation and information management. Information provides the lifeblood for any organization to make data-driven decisions and capture business insight. IT enables all critical business processes which underpin business capabilities in enabling digital transformation. IT has the necessary structures, methodologies, and tools in shaping the new box of thinking and managing the emergent digital complexity with new characteristics such as hyper-connectivity, hyper-diversity, and hyper-dynamism. IT has to become an innovation engine for business growth. IT capabilities directly make an impact on business competencies and IT maturity is proportional to overall organizational maturity.

IT transformation is on the horizon to improve IT maturity by shifting its role from a reactive support center to a proactive value creator; from a back-office function to an qinnovation brain yard; from an order taker to a strategy co-creator; and from a help desk to the growth engine of the digital organization. IT is always at the center of change, IT needs to speed up and improve its maturity from functioning to firm to delight and from efficiency to effectiveness to agility.

3 IT as a Revenue Rainmaker

The payoff of IT digital transformation is not just for the quick win, but for building the long-term business competency.

Traditional IT organizations are perceived as the cost center, running in an operation driven mode. Nowadays, with the exponential growth of information and lightweight digital technologies, forward-looking organizations across industrial sectors claim they are in the information management business. There is a high expectation of IT to drive changes and lead digital transformation. CIOs should market themselves and advocate IT as an integrated component of the company in order to run IT as an innovation engine and revenue generator for the business. CIOs must set priority right and have an IT transformation checklist on how to answer the questions such as: How do we get revenues to boost IT as a revenue creator now? How will we do it in the future? How should IT help the company win businesses? How can IT contribute to customer acquisition and retention? And how to run digital IT as a revenue rainmaker?

●       IT can become known as a revenue rainmaker by associating its efforts directly with sources of income: IT needs a shift from inside-out operation driven to outside-in customer-centric. CIOs are able to spot opportunities to increase revenues. IT has two sets of customers, internal business users as well as external end customers. IT needs to provide efficient platforms and tools to improve productivity and efficiency of internal customers. But more importantly, looking for solutions which will directly benefit the external end customer will improve the business competitive advantage and in-turn bring in increased revenue. Business people with revenue-enhancement projects often don't request IT projects to support them because they don't know what IT can do. CIOs have to communicate with the business to find these projects and then, talk with business managers responsible for them about what could be done. CIOs should also work with the business on plugging revenue leakages; business unit managers need back to back KPIs with CIOs on applications or service deliveries so that the organization can see oneness is superior to the sum of pieces.

●       IT is part of the business and business is becoming IT: Business case justification is important in IT portfolio management. The first thing is to stop calling IT initiative, profits and ROIs should be the driving force behind any IT project. IT projects should be called a business project with a clear objective, business justification, and full alignment with the overall company’s objectives; otherwise, they do not exist. Like any other business initiative from another part of the company, developing a compelling strategic business case is especially critical when an initiative is difficult to monetize. That is, attach believable dollar values to identified benefits flows. If you have a project or program without a sponsor, you need to take a fast and hard look at the business case that justifies the program you are engaged in or spend assets on. Lack of commitment and support should be seen as a significant uncertainty and should be reflected as such in your risk assessment for the program.

●       Make sure the executive team first understands what it needs to drive future business growth and revenue growth: CIOs will contribute to revenue generation when they are part of the senior executives' team responsible for strategy making and revenue targets. Companies are recognizing that IT is roughly coupled with the business strategy, it is a very good sign about how the companies will deliver value. CIOs have to be an integral part of the top leadership team for driving business value, bringing technology vision in strategy making, and envisioning the future products strategy. IT leaders have to be hand-in-glove with the business executives to map out the vision, fully aligned with the business executives in articulating the business strategy, put the framework in place to map the strategic objectives into KPIs and then, determine what technology investments will accelerate the changes you want to see in your KPIs. Launch innovative delivery channels for improving sales revenues and ultimately net profit.

Let revenue generation or profit increase become the focus vs. cost savings. The payoff of IT digital transformation is not just for quick wins, but to build the long-term business competency. In this regard, the focus of digital IT organization should gain more strength as a revenue rainmaker.

4 IT as Business Productivity Booster

Highly effective IT management exists within a business to improve productivity, increase revenue, reduce costs, optimize business solutions, and accelerate business performance.

Information & technology management is not for its own sake, but to deliver quality services and solutions that drive business growth and improve organizational maturity. Improving productivity and accelerating business performance are some noble business goals behind running a digital IT organization. This includes all aspects of the company such as information management, logistics, application throughput, employee engagement, and overall health of the organization, etc. But more specifically, how to run digital IT as business productivity and performance booster?

●       Do the multifactor productivity and performance analysis: There are two level performance analyses: The first is about a productivity ratio at a macro level, and the second, it’s about determining what portion of any productivity gains are due entirely to IT investments. IT department provides guidance, support, assistance, and direction in the application and adoption of information technology solutions in support of business objectives, improve business productivity and performance. At the strategic level, senior executives focus on the top line business revenue growth. When they recognize that IT is roughly coupled with the business strategy, with tangible measurement of improving performance and productivity, IT has the better chance to be perceived as a business partner, rather than a cost center. IT needs to be measured based on how it can help business identify true cost savings, workflow optimization, additional revenue growth opportunities, and process efficiency. Determining what contribution IT investments make to higher productivity is a little more complex and probably requires some sort of multifactor productivity analysis, data, and time, where the productivity increase can only be attributed to IT, all other things being the same. The multifactor productivity analysis would also examine the business process to determine what element of production made the employees more productive, a change in policy, training, efficient tools, etc, with the goal to take a structural way for improving productivity.

●       Understand the interconnectivity of productivity, automation, quality, performance, and employee engagement: Digital technologies are lightweight, powerful, intuitive, and fast. Organizations today have to aggressively leverage digital technologies, platforms, and tools as the enabler of communication, collaboration, social interaction and forward-thinking. It’s also important to automate the logistic part of the business to further improve productivity, performance, and quality. Automation is needed for achieving business efficiency by balancing demand and supply. The first stage in the journey to automation must be to examine core business processes and identify how they can be designed efficiently and how they connect to other processes seamlessly, in order to