How to Create a Business Enabling IT Organization – Part 1
My recent posts have focused on the need for a business enabling IT where IT drives new business opportunities. From experience, very few organizations are at that level of IT maturity, or even have a plan how to reach that level of maturity, rather IT lives a life of its own, and in some cases, even worse, IT thinks of themselves as necessary so the business can wait for IT; when IT is ready to serve the business, IT will serve the business.
This type of situation obviously does not work very well, and these types of organizations finds themselves focused on cutting IT costs, and regular changing IT leadership. In addition, the IT leadership reporting structure tend to change fairly frequently too, and the other senior executives are taking turns “dealing with†IT.
When IT has dug itself into a hole that is so deep, it is not an easy task to climb out of the hole, and it will take time to change IT and ITs culture, and even longer before the business will change how it works or deals with IT.
Changing the culture of any organization is among the most difficult tasks any organization can undertake, people do not want to change and there will be resistance from within IT and from external stakeholders.
While it is very hard to do, changing ITs operating model is a worthwhile undertaking, and a requirement in this world of hyper competitive markets. Like I highlighted in my previous posts, if an organization is not maximizing the competitive advantage leveraging all business functions, it stands to be left behind, and ultimately fight for survival instead of leading innovation.
There is not one way an IT organization will work optimally, it depends on the organization IT operates within, the customers, and many other factors. But, there are best practices that can universally be applied. In the next three posts, I will break out significant considerations and best practices to do this, organized around PPT, and that is not PowerPoint, it is People, Process, and lastly Technology. People create processes based on business needs, processes drive technology investments.
Disclaimer – this post is unaffiliated with my employer.