Wednesday, March 21, 2018

How to Unleash Information Power for Improving Business Maturity

Organizations rely more and more on technology, and the information is the lifeblood of the digital business.

 Business and technology are now forever interwoven, and IT is the linchpin of running a digital business. IT is shifting from “T” oriented monolithic type support center to “I” driven mosaic style of information hub of the business. CIOs need to provide leadership to the organization from board level down to the business unit and IT organization, to ride learning curves, keep the pace of rapid changes, and unleash information power for improving business responsiveness and maturity.



Digital CIOs need to provide the strategic vision and insight into how information technology can better catalyze the organization's ability to achieve strategic objectives: IT becomes so critically, many times, it is a determining success factor for the long-term business strategy to achieve fast growth goals and long-term sustainability. CIOs need to do a better job of sharing the technological vision and articulating the existing and potential value of IT to the business, with the language and measurement senior executives understand. Business acumen and technical knowledge would help IT leaders understand business priorities, opportunities, and the strategic need for IT to provide solutions with business language, to truly reinvent IT as the strategic enhancer. IT leaders need to practice expert power for advising the business and building mutual trust and exemplify how IT directly impacts productivity and catalyze business innovations. CIOs can ask their business partners: Are there any tools your competitors apply that you need to look at? Are your tools simple to use to improve productivity? These questions help show a willingness to engage people outside of IT on how best to solve a problem, or achieve an opportunity IT staffs at all levels needs to understand how the business makes and loses money, and how IT can create platforms and tools for individuals to do their job more effectively and create opportunities for the business’s long-term prosperity. That is exactly why IT is a team effort where members of the team work together to accomplish the work.

Being a trusted information broker to the board, other C-suite executives and stakeholders regarding IT issues, concerns, and considerations: Digital is about information flow, idea flow, and therefore business flow. Information brings about business ideas; business ideas generate lots of information. Information Systems are the backbone and provide valuable information for key decision making and catching business insight. Information and technology catalyze today's digital businesses. Information comes from the analysis of that data, technology allows for the capture, manipulation, and presentation of information. Running digital IT to enforce the strategic focus and harness business competency requires thinking beyond, managing information cycle effectively, altering or changing the frame of reference to create previously unconsidered business solutions to either old problems or emerging issues. Information, in fact, is one of the most critical pieces in solving innovation puzzles nowadays. IT must bring to the table innovative solutions that meet customers’ needs, while reducing the cost to market, without the sacrifice of goals and strategies invoked by business-IT co-partnership.


IT application portfolio is managed efficiently and effectively and consistently deliver a high-quality product and service to the organization within budget and schedule thresholds: IT management effectiveness is not based on the inside-out IT operational lens but through the outside-in business lens. The balanced IT application portfolio can deliver lots of value for the business in many ways, and it is apart from the basic automation, availability of information and reports. IT portfolio rationalization is an activity more critical than ever because economic cycles are getting shorter, and decision cycles are getting short as well. This is the digital arena, IT applications, and its dynamics are totally different. The right IT applications blended with current digital trends can deliver unique benefits to the business. In order to make the portfolio executable, an organization needs to make sure that enough resources are available to deliver business results on schedule and on value, enable new digital services/solutions, and add new revenue streams through digital computing.

Organizations rely more and more on technology, and the information is the lifeblood of the digital business. IT needs will only expand. The CIO’s ability to build fundamental business competency is now greater than ever. Information technology should be seen by any business as the growth engine as well as the business optimizer which continues trimming the wastes and tuning the cost to achieve business efficiency, workflow optimizations, and identify additional revenue opportunities for the entire company and improve business competency. The business also expects IT to be in sync with business strategy and goals and become the trustful partner to run a high mature digital business.

1 comments:

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