All Torque, no Traction—Facets of IT Modernization

Transforming IT infrastructure and technologies to meet modern business goals better and objectives are essential to business transformation. ?How far along are your organization's current IT modernization efforts?? Among the many reasons for modernization, the following are the areas that often shows up in assessments:

• Quality of services
• Cost Efficiencies
• Availability / Uptime
• Customer experience satisfaction
• New revenue-generating products/services
• Extract business value from data
• Agility / faster time to market.?
• Risk profile

While your organization's reasons to innovate and transform may vary; innovation speaks beyond the mere inventiveness aspects; it is "something different that creates business value and differentiation.". Innovation has become one of the most critical factors for long-term success. The innovation path is not simple; each organization chooses its unique approach to solving unique problems. Organizations should be able to create a clear vision of how their company's competitive advantage will be formed in the future and build an organization that is constantly evolving and innovating to strengthen that vision.

Understanding that innovation is not just a single event, but a challenging ongoing process is an excellent start in avoiding the obstacles that prevent integrating your business process and aligning with your strategy and vision to modernization. ?Innovative organizations:

• Foster a mindset that assumes that there's a better way to do things.
• Focus on deeply understanding customers stated and unstated needs and desires.
• Collaborate across and beyond the organization
• Recognize that success requires experimentation, rapid iteration, and frequent failure.
• Empower people to take considered risks, voice dissenting opinions, and seek needed resources.

Often, innovations arise at the intersections of disciplines or when people with different perspectives look at the same problem.

Innovation is a CIO imperative, and IT leaders have positioned themselves as digital transformation champions within their organizations. There are, however, many impediments that could limit delivering on business outcome expectations. The challenges of enabling cross-functional teams, moving great ideas from the Lab to operations, and managing day-to-day operations are just a few.

Executives' leadership often expresses?"… businesses are organized to deliver predictable, reliable results—and that's exactly the problem...".?

However, a significant paradox that leadership faces is that the systems that enable success with today's model reinforce behaviors inconsistent with discovering tomorrow's model. The autoimmune reaction:?Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Common Innovation obstacles and how to overcome them:

Inability to act on signals.?Recognizing the need for change remains a significant blocker in enacting an innovative new product, service, or procedure.

?"People focus on the here and now, the immediate problems they face to get through the current financial year." The time to think about innovation is tomorrow." —?Mark Butcher

Ensure that your business has a dedicated innovation program with an established leader at the helm who has experience in the technical and business side of innovation and the knowledge to recognize relevant trends.

?Inefficient IT Operations: Among the top impediments to IT innovation remains the continued presence of legacy technology, technical debt, and outdated processes.

?"Lots of people doing stuff is not innovation if it isn't the right stuff." —?Ben Welch.

CIOs continue having to divert funds and staff to managing, maintaining inefficient and complex infrastructure. To deliver the next-generation services, organizations must find ways to simplify and streamline the legacy environment and deal with the day-to-day routines and rituals that often stifle innovation.

Ineffective collaboration:?Despite trying, many organizations have neglected building partnerships and enabling deeper cooperation among IT staff, counterparts throughout the organization, and their partner ecosystem. Focus on delivering business outcomes and solving business problems along with fostering an innovation mindset.

?"It is not enough to have leaders that prioritize, incentivize, and create an inspiring vision for innovation. They also have to defer power" — Mathew Chow?

Lack of innovation structure (Manage the journey):?Teams need to have avenues to vet, prioritize their ideas.?

?"So many ideas slowly die in organizations as they don't have a structure or processes for taking ideas forward." —?Craig Linton.?

Having a "system/structure" for reviewing and approving proposals will enable teams to explore innovative possibilities and demonstrate that their ideas will work through proof of concept and proof of value. So often, there is a lack of speed and rigor in idea validation, incubation, and acceleration. Dedicating time to innovation delivers results.?

?Leaders must create learning opportunities for their staff to keep pace with the rapid advancements in technology.

?Lack of customer connection:??IT needs to link their services to the actual customer—the people that buy your company's products or services.

?Inability to scale fast (Stuck in the Lab):?While many organizations have formalized a structure for vetting ideas to innovation, many remain challenged with operationalizing innovative ideas to scale.

?"... people say they want to be innovative. They come up with ideas and then don't do anything..." -?Craig Linton.

As a result, many ideas either die or get trimmed down, diminishing its business's value. Short-term thinking is another impediment to innovation. While we must aim towards continuous integration and delivery to get [new products, business capabilities ] out there and validated, innovation may need more breathing room, but If you [work for] months and find out you've missed your target, that's costly.

How to start turning things around?

• Define what the?desired characteristics?for your team and organization are. Most organizations have expressed the importance of agile culture, learning-oriented, customer-obsessed, data-driven, and experimental as the desired behavior.?
• Identify blockers and come up with interventions.?Look for things that are getting in the way of innovative behaviors. How would your organization complete the sentences: "Wouldn't it be great if we…" (which surfaces the behaviors; ) and "But we don't because…" (which helps pinpoint the blockers).

Where your organization is on its journey will determine the areas of focus; consider the following:

Align IT with the business.?Determine which improvements fit the overall business strategy, find opportunities to align with that vision, and develop a well-thought-out plan.

Simplify and optimize IT.??Complex systems often prevent organizations from focusing on their strategic agendas. In addition, aging IT estates can run up costs, impede quality and slow the pace of change. Organizations should fine-tune their modernization priorities to address:?

• Delayed, infrequent, and error-prone production releases resulting in lost opportunities.
• Duplicate and redundant environments, leading to suboptimal utilization of IT resources.?
• Messy, inflexible, and technology-debt-ridden heritage software with inherent design issues leading to maintenance nightmares, including high overhead.

Modernize applications and data.?Essentially, decide where an application and data should live and how it will best serve those who consume it. Innovation barriers are often both technical and financial.

?Something to explore further - The Leading initiatives that support modernization efforts are typically tasks related to:

• Operating environment & Cloud strategies.
• Application Modernization strategies
• Process Improvements, such as continuous integration and delivery, real-time monitoring, automation, and more.

To close the gap between leaders' innovation goals and reality, organizations must methodically dismantle blockers to innovation and encourage experimentation.

Truly knowing your business, flaws, and all can help you identify which issues are more likely to arise as you kick-start or expand your innovation program. Then, harnessing the power of innovation can complement an already good business and transform it into a great one.

But unfortunately, every business is unique, and there is no magic bullet or secret formula that can guarantee innovation success.

Instead, organizations must see innovation as a systematically managed journey—the point is to keep moving forward, reaping the rewards as you go. Businesses must build and scale up to maximize the returns on promising inventions with the right capabilities to keep up with changing markets.