Balancing Transformation with Running the Business
Leveraging transformational change appropriately can help a business grow, but forgetting the basics can cause problems. Both the business and IT organizations need to balance the need for market focus and rapid transformation with managing the legacy operations that generate the profits and pay the bills. Always chasing the next bright shiny object can be just as dangerous for a business as staying entrenched in legacy products and processes. Becoming too enamored with shiny objects can result in losing sight of the basics of what made the business successful to begin with resulting in lower customer satisfaction, lower profits, declining base revenue, etc.
Identifying how to balance the need for transformation with the need for continual optimization of existing processes and products is an area where high quality IT executives can add tremendous value as described in the brief article below from the Wall Street Journal.
WSJ CIO Journal - The Morning Download: IT Charity Begins at Home
By Tom Loftus
Good morning, CIOs. If you consider your primary duty as an IT executive to spearhead digital transformation across the company, you might be doing it wrong. The Hackett Group Inc., in a report analyzing IT operations at hundreds of large corporations, finds that many IT departments, in the rush to digital tools, may be neglecting their own needs. And as CIO Journal’s Angus Loten reports, this customer-focused outlook, ironically, can spell trouble for the entire company.
Trickle down IT. "Without optimizing how IT itself operates within a company, efforts to improve other business-side systems and processes with cloud computing, artificial intelligence, automation and other capabilities risk hitting a bottleneck that leaves the entire business lagging behind competitors, the IT consulting firm said.”
Respect yourself. Scott Holland, Hackett’s global IT executive advisory practice leader, tells Mr. Loten that companies with optimized tech departments tend to see IT 'as a valued business partner,' rather than a cost center to supply and service technology for other divisions across the company.