Back to: How to Build Pragmatic, Comprehensive & Agile IT Strategy for the Digital Age
Introduction
Everyone who has worked in any IT organization has listened, at least one time in his professional career, some of those statements and judgments on the failures and limits of any IT department to support the business needs:
- IT management had difficulty keeping staff focused on strategic initiatives
- IT had lost credibility with the business by missing deadlines and delivering inappropriate systems
- IT staff has limited interest on the business strategy and it is not fully aligned with business needs
- All our prior top IT strategic initiatives failed; so now we need an executable strategy with clear actions defined
- An IT strategy is immediately needed to manage our growing complexity
- My IT department needs to be creative and innovative with business
I would like to focus on some key challenges that nowadays every CIO or IT leadership team, face for succeeding in their own organization into their organization in order to bring value and effectively support the corporate strategy and needs.
- Business Strategy is fast-changing and IT must understand what the Business Strategy is and how to support it in a timely fashion
- Information technology is becoming more and more a source of competitive advantage and an enabler for innovation and new business models
- Compared to other company organization departments, the IT department has more challenges because it has to interface with each of those different business functions providing a solution that harmonizes differently, and sometimes competing objectives and needs
- As the internal and external business environment evolves a certain amount of shift is experienced in the system landscape that must be managed by the IT department in order to avoid building an unmanageable architecture and wasting resources
- The role of IT Organization is changing from being a provider of ICT solutions to be a Broker and Orchestrator between the customer and Cloud services