Transforming IT strategy into a strategic opportunity – or how business organisations learn to apply a realistic view on information technology

Ten years ago, I headed a large IT infrastructure project, requiring me and two other project managers to oversee the move of hundreds of physical servers behind a firewall. Except for the fact that data belonged to numerous individual customer projects, no one showed interest in actually turning this data into a valuable resource.

Much in line with this, few—if any—considered the potential of interconnectivity in support of increased dialogue with customer segments relevant. Focus was shed on how new contracts could be orchestrated to facilitate continued existence of those servers behind the firewall where someone was willing to pay for that; all other nodes were deemed for discontinuance.

Supported by highly skilled and competent colleagues, the team completed the endeavour at the time expected through hard work and a determined focus on keeping control of complex stakeholder interests, server configurations and constantly changing requirements afloat. While the project resembled any other endeavour of its time, servers had in common the fact that they connected to the same network and required to reconnect to a different one.

One decade later, managing such projects reflects a significantly different level of business expectations. Management teams in organisations across sectors and industries acknowledged that information technology is not just about virtualisation and ‘nano-fication’ of computer power, but realising the potential to be extracted from applying information technology in the right context.

Putting it simply, information technology grew out of its infancy of bits and bytes and into becoming a platform of data sources and network facilitation beyond imagination.

In retrospect, a well-known paradigm influencing the history of information technology, Moore’s law for decades set the targets for leveraging innovation in the electronics and computer industry. While seemingly appearing to flatten out and reaching a point of saturation, manufacturing of semiconductors performing even more convincing (e.g. 22nm => 14nm) continue to power products shipped to consumers and business customers. Still, somehow other criteria appear to dictate efforts of numerous management teams in defining the IT and business strategies of organisations.

The extent to which computer power over time enabled organisations to facilitate economic prioritisation of resources, increased cost efficiency and optimised supply chain logic, information technology elevated its importance into information systems, gradually transforming into a critical source of long-term income. As such, a large number of corporate organisations are today experiencing unseen levels of empowerment to create strategic value from a business infrastructure carrying tactical and operational potential in the past.

In light of that, the discipline of shaping IT strategy also reshaped forming future business strategies. On the one hand seen more and more defined by the same factors, disruptive innovation influences the nature, range and power of business strategies on the other. Therefore, management teams are required to consider competencies, capabilities and organisational structures in a new and completely different context, departing the traditional perception of how functions and the employees staffing them compete and deliver value.

A project and programme manager for nearly two decades, my experience tells that IT moved from a secondary business discipline to a highly critical resource, carrying substantial cross-functional impacts. In turn, this transformation influenced both the requirements of the competencies populating IT departments and the way they consider their contribution to value creation in the organisation. While primarily focused on ensuring the IT aspects of the solution in the past, IT project managers in today’s business organisations must execute on a far more business-oriented understanding and approach in delivering solutions.

Approaching this development from the opposite end of the spectrum, renowned consulting firms and business icons like Google and Amazon hire top notch MBA candidates specialised in data analytics, capturing the intersection of process digitisation and business modelling. Also in that light, the same journey is now affecting my career.

While previously executing on IT project management by adhering solely to fulfilment of requirements for the sake of IT, a shift towards fulfilment of business requirements has taken place, reflecting how serious most management teams consider the integration of resources relating directly and indirectly to information technology as a critical resource.

The very same shift also relates to survival in a complex and competitively oriented business environment in a rapidly changing market, requiring business organisations to upgrade presents approaches to managing organisational capabilities.

Above all, business organisations adapting to the digital era must realise that initiatives traditionally emerging from the IT department—because competencies know how IT works—no longer proves strong. Many organisations arrived at that conclusion. For example, at Carlsberg, a Danish brewery and global supplier of beer and licensed beverages, digitisation of 15 critical business processes took place during the course of few months. While business managers assumed process ownership, assisted by information, BI and IT infrastructure specialists, senior management acknowledged that ownership and initiatives must emerge from the primary business functions in the value chain and not supportive ones like the IT department.

Over the years, management teams used IT for breaking down barriers in arriving at better quality for decision-making. Disregarding the fact that decisions themselves might be wrong in the first place, business organisations have never been so gifted as is currently the case when in need for data to support strategic choices. Heavily backed up by unseen levels of reaching customers through interconnectivity, tools for managing big data and competencies to perform analytics in understanding detailed information about customer [future] needs, CxOs and senior management are seriously required to translate thoughts into action regarding transformation to a digital strategy.