Sunday, January 15, 2017

Achieving IT Premium via Three Excellences

The ultimate goal is to push the IT organization to be clear about its position via the company's core business strategy and pull all the resources for achieving the multi-level of the business excellence.

Businesses large and small are on the journey of digital transformation, nowadays IT becomes the change driver and the business differentiator. Companies that lacked the skills to manage information technology effectively suffered compared with competitors that had mastered those skills. Business needs IT to deliver services/ solutions that drive business productivity and effectiveness, and IT needs to achieve premium via the multitude of the management excellence.


Operational Excellence: IT plays a crucial role in optimizing business operation management capacity with a keen eye to grasp growth opportunities, manage risks, and improve operational efficiency via applying lightweight technologies seamlessly. IT helps to integrate/optimize/orchestrate business processes to facilitate the business outcomes and build an effective digital ecosystem. By nature, technology is complex, every intelligence has complexity behind it, though it doesn’t mean IT should make things more and more complicated. In fact, “Keep it Simple” should always be one of the guiding principles and management cultures for running IT to achieve operational excellence. IT is the lubricant to a well-designed business system, hence, IT management needs to be in the continuous tuning mode through consolidation, modernization, integration, and optimization, streamline IT processes, and tighten coordination and collaboration with the business partners. Many IT organizations suffer from overloaded tasks and overwhelming information, prioritization brings transparency and aligns IT portfolio management with the strategic business goals and objectives. When a CIO is able to position and maintain the IT organization to ensure it addresses both "IT effectiveness" and "IT efficiency," to achieve operational excellence, they have earned their stripes.


Innovation Excellence: It is not enough for IT to just “Keep the lights on,” CIOs need to reinvent IT via “Doing more with innovation.” Leadership towards true value creation for any organization will come from the willingness of its leaders to knock down the barriers separating insulated IT teams and the revenue generating business ownership teams. CIOs need to become business leaders within IT and seek ways to grow revenues, profitability and spur innovation. That's a completely different mindset than managing technology only. Running IT as an innovative outlier is truly about bringing the new perspective to grow businesses and delight customers; to both capture opportunities and manage risks timely, to become customer-centric and business focused. To run an innovative IT organization, the more difficult challenge is not just launching successful teams, but maintaining the motivation and focus of the people. The intersection of IT and people is where innovation happens; companies need to invest in IT necessary to advance businesses through either incremental or radical innovation. IT can achieve the innovation excellence if IT is regarded as a strategic business partner and given the role in catalyzing innovation and driving the business transformation.


Digital Workforce Excellence: As the digitized world becomes hyper-connected, over-complex and interdependent, the bar is actually raised higher either being a digital leader or being a digital professional. Because, nowadays, the line between our professional life and personal life is blurring, thanks for the technology to make everything so transparent. Being a digital professional means consistency to be who you are, thinking independently with the capability to make a good judgment, being clear about his/her responsibility and added value in the organization; and corporations also should inspire people to grow and become who they want to be. The advanced digital workforce continues to depoliticize working culture, dismantle bureaucracy, solve business problems via multi-dimensional thinking processes and multiple choice of solutions, think out of the box, pack it in a new box which then creates a new innovative idea. IT also plays a crucial role in empowering digital workforce with efficient tools to improving productivity, achieving workforce excellence, and integrating people, process, and technology into the differentiated business competency.   


The multidimensional digital effects provide impressive advantages in term of the speed of delivery, the quality of information for decision making, the responsiveness of the business, and the wisdom of digital workforces. The ultimate goal is to push the IT organization to be clear about its position via the company's core business strategy and pull all the resources for achieving the multilevel of the business excellence. Once that's clear, the CIO must re-enforce that position by demonstrating every day how IT contributes to it, to do more with less, but also do more with innovation.

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