Running IT as an innovation engine starts from mind shift of the IT leaders, to reinvent IT as a change agent, business optimizer, innovation catalyst,
Information permeates everywhere in the organization and technology is the powerful force for running a modern company. To deal with frequent disruptions and fierce competitions, IT has to change its reputation from a controller to an innovation engine, take different propositions and approaches to drive business transformation. Leading only with operational considerations is not the way forward. IT management needs to evaluate: What are the key values it can bring to IT or business as a whole? How about the value/cost ratio? How about User feedback and overall customer experience? How about short term win vs. Long term Perspective? Etc.
IT personalization: What matters now, innovation, forward-looking businesses now think IT as their innovation engine, do IT users have better capabilities to be innovative or less? On average, do IT users perceive IT with significantly higher maturity, or not so much difference? Innovation is in the eye of the beholder -customers. Customers are at the center of running a high-performance organization, being customer-centric is the ultimate goal for any forward-looking organizations today. Customers must be willing to pay for it, be it a products/processes/services to fit their needs. Focusing on customers’ needs should be an easier path to grow the innovation fruit. IT has both internal customers and end-customers – who buy the goods or services from their company.
Personalization leads to customer loyalty. IT personalization improves people-centricity significantly. When IT can really understand or attempt to capture the insight about what customers actually want, it reaches the inflection point of IT personalization by introducing new products or new methods of production. Visualizing customer experience enables the business to design and bring personalized solutions that meet customers’ needs, foster better ways the application can perform and optimize every touch point of user experience, deliver customized solutions consistently.
IT simplicity: IT is perhaps one of the most complex pieces in the innovation puzzle. But the user interface of IT applications needs to be intuitive, easy to use for increasing customer adoption rate. IT has to look at itself first, simplify the way it does things by making an objective assessment: Does IT add the un-necessary restrictions on users/systems? Or It has the necessary design complexity to enforce service delivery. IT management needs to figure out the “just right” level of simplicity by taking a structural approach to consolidate, modernize, integrate, automate, and optimize for having the minimum required complexity, improving IT functional performance, competencies, flexibility and maturity.
“Less is more” needs to become the digital principle for innovating IT. The first is to try to analyze what the impact of complexity is on an IT system (such as process, customers, technology); the second is to look for the impact of removing some of the complication or unnecessary complexity by simplification or optimization. The science of IT management is to simplify unnecessary complexity, retire legacy systems; reassess any systems that sucks too much resource cost, and energy, or it requires too much IT effort; manage the full cycle of application management, tighten coordination with vendors and partners, in order to improve organizational responsiveness, efficiency and maturity.
IT Integration: IT is in a unique position to oversee organizational structures and processes which underpin business capabilities. IT integration is to maximize the value from existing IT systems and the need for better business responsiveness and performance. Integration can be very difficult, costly and hard to justify the ROI. But making IT integrated into the company with process maturity is a crucial step to ensure information consistency, platform unification, interface intuition, or capability coherence, etc. Integration and quality management are the keys to ensure that the application ecosystem offers real value and also is necessary for future agility.
IT management helps to build the business’s innovation capabilities/maturity by integrating process, technology, talent into cohesive business capability. Keep in mind, integrating the right systems for the right business reasons can be extremely valuable. It might not be cost effective in the short term but it will be in the long term. Thus, integration has to be done with a “big picture,” having the business architecture in mind that supports the strategic goals of the organization such as revenue growth, margin improvement, customer satisfaction, security, and interoperability, etc, for running a highly responsive and high-performance business.
Innovation is an important business capability to decide the business’s long-term prosperity. Running IT as an innovation engine starts from mind shift of the IT leaders, to reinvent IT as a change agent, business optimizer, innovation catalyst, and build a IT enabled integral platform to orchestrate change, facilitate idea creation and implementation, to meet the ultimate goal of an organization’s short/medium/long-term strategic plans.
