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.
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 a 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.
