Does IT matter? “The Reality Check”

Well is there a simple answer to this question? Yes, it boils down to the CEO the Executive team and the IT department themselves. The role of IT should be to proactively enable the business, initiate ideas then make them happen with or without technology. CIOs should work towards an integrated approach by blending of IT into the business, no longer just a supplier but completely integrated into the business itself.  Get the CEO and Executive teams to recognise that IT is not a threat but an opportunity to drive customer value. The Unique Selling Point (USP) of IT is that it is the only department in most companies that can see across the organisation having a deep understanding of the different parts, sometimes more so than the department themselves. Therefore ideally placed for spotting opportunities to reduce duplication as a result costs, ability to spread continuous improvement, drive innovation across departments, and able to provide skilled   motivated experts around the business. Therefore there are ten things CIO’s should focus on for 2010;

1.  Think Customer, then think customer again, always think customer and don’t forget to ask them what they think too.
2. Own innovation, make time for your colleagues to innovate and break the taboos around open innovation. Look for new ways to develop, create or reengineer new sales and distribution channels.
3. Stop trying to align the Business & IT strategies, work towards just creating a single integrated one. Note: “IT is not a threat it is only IT people that make it that”
4. Communicate developments in your market and highlight the inflection points within the industry and tell colleagues what you are doing to address it.
5. Waste is prevalent with most businesses learn to spot and relentlessly seek to reduce it.
6. Embrace ‘flow’ be the enabler of it, keep processes simple and work at the customers rate of demand. Change the method of delivery to enable fast proto types, mashups and continuous integration. Co-locate teams within the business regularly around the current business themes fast set-up and fast tear-down of them. Note: “don’t run around chasing the ball like a bunch of 8 year olds playing rugby pick the key business agendas and form around them”.
7. Get out on the floor, dive below the permafrost of middle management and collect facts and get opinions from the experts running the business.
8. Drive the business strategy with an appropriate Enterprise Architecture model. “Story Board” senior managers in the business through transitions to a better state clearly articulating where the opportunities for adding customer value at each point are.
9. Another USP for IT is being an expert in real time 24x7x365 operations. Take immediate proactive steps to address the inflection point around ‘social media’ and get your business enabled to address the real time web. Note. “It’s no longer good enough to respond 48hours after a customer failure by that time in today’s world the damage may have already been done also there is massive untapped opportunity in leveraging the crowd on the real time web and  build the hybrid skills needed into your team.”
10. Keep the ‘IT’ operational lights on 365x24x7 and continuously look for root cause of any failures and put steps in to stop them happening again. Note: “This is the ticket onto the big stage without this you will get absolutely no where”