Navigating the Digital Era: How IT Leadership Transforms Organizations

With 25+ years of experience in the tech space, I can vouch that only one thing is constant: change. But by empowering our teams to be part of the digital transformation, we can set our businesses up for success.

The three-legged stool of any business strategy consists of people, process, and technology. To ensure each remains sturdy and that together they drive organizational growth, here are some ways I approach IT leadership.

Keep people learning

Having the right people in the right seat is crucial. Yet like everything in IT, correctly positioning their skills within an organization is a lifecycle of its own. What – or who – worked for a company five years ago might no longer work now.

This is why we train people, keeping them not just on top but ahead of new technologies. For instance, at @World Emblem we’re now revamping our tracking system, which is the heartbeat of our operations. The colleague leading this project intimately knows the system because he’s been working on it for years. But because the code is over a decade old, we need to rewrite it with a new language. Our colleague is now embracing the opportunity to learn new technologies while leveraging his 10 years of tribal knowledge.

I myself start the day by scanning LinkedIn feeds from various industry sources, staying up on the latest trends and innovations, and attend monthly CIO forums to learn from my peers and other industry events. Additionally, I follow the advice I give team members: attend seminars and workshops to get knowledge and skills to exploit newer technologies.

Reassess processes

Just as people need to evolve, so do processes. As a CIO, it’s part of my job to regularly assess how all our different departments interoperate. Equipped with that knowledge, we then create interdepartmental processes that best serve our internal business partners and customers.

World Emblem is right in the middle of a Lean initiative. To get training on the Lean process, we have partnered with experts from the University of Kentucky, who were part of the Toyota team that initially implemented The Toyota Way, which has become the catalyst for Lean principles, and what we call True Lean internally. We’re learning how to implement processes that save time, eliminate waste, and focus on blue-chip activities. This approach not only enhances the efficiency of our Operational teams, but also our Administrative and IT teams, but ensures the processes are the right fit for our people and technology.

Our own BHAG (that big, hairy, audacious goal) began as a 7-year vision to get our emblems recognized by everyone. The goal remains on everybody’s mind, but we are also free to make changes, deletions, and additions to it along the way. That way our processes should continuously align with broader organizational objectives while keeping up with the dynamic IT landscape.

Choose tech that adds value

The rate at which technology evolves is crazy – every year, there’s something new. While it might seem important to jump on every new trend, it’s more effective to invest in features and innovations that add real value. This is especially the case for a smaller company.

Although World Emblem is just a relatively small IT organization, we have two security experts, which we didn’t have previously. When I started working in IT many years ago, no one knew what a virus was. Today having an in-house security program is vital because cyber threats have skyrocketed in the last 30 years.

By contrast, we don’t have an R&D department dealing solely with AI or whatever the next big thing is. Since we’re really trying to move forward with innovation, this can be a bit challenging. However, we work around those limitations by brainstorming amongst ourselves and leveraging our partners.

From mainframes to the cloud

IT has dramatically shifted since I began my career. That was the time of monolithic mainframes when everything was in-house and IT folks sat in the basement. Fast-forward through the dot-com boom, and I see how nowadays a lot of IT now revolves around cloud computing and hosting.

Many companies today don’t have to buy a lot of equipment or hire a lot of staff. But still, we want to manage the people and the processes that keep our companies running with empathy and efficiency. And we need to ensure our technology will generate value without having adverse impacts.

As IT leaders, we can energize teams, come to better solutions faster, and help our businesses grow. By accepting change as something native to our digital era, we have the chance to lead our companies not just to survive transformation but to thrive in it.