Reimagining IT: The 2011 CIO Agenda certainly makes a big claim - IT is changing so rapidly, conventional thinking fails to keep pace with the industry.
This statement is as alarming for businesses that are not well informed, as it is for companies trying to offer support to businesses that want the latest solutions and the benefits of those solutions.
To quote from the Gartner Publications Executive Summary: “2010 was a year of economic, strategic and technological transitions and achievements that have made IT stronger. Over the next five years, almost half of all CIOs expect to operate the majority of their applications and infrastructures via cloud technologies. This change requires that CIOs re-imagine IT and lead it through a process of ‘creative destruction.’”
We all associate destruction with pain and expense and yet here, one of the most respected consultancies in the IT industry (who surveyed 2,014 CIOs in 50 countries responsible for $160 billion of IT budgets), is telling us that we must destroy our current plans and re-imagine the future to provide support for growth and competitive advantage. Their words, not mine.
As it happens, I agree with them. Too often I see organisations running old-school IT departments and supporting staff with an in-house IT team, who are failing to add value or support growth. Today, a business doesn’t need to be too far behind in its IT systems to be missing out on mobility, scalability, elasticity, redundancy and recoverability. If too much of the IT budget is spent on staff who are failing to innovate, it‘s very hard to invest enough on innovation to reduce the dependency on the staff.
As global economies improve, growth will be on the agenda for a lot of companies. According to Gartner, more of our services businesses will obtain revenue from digital services, but to do this they will need to become fully digitised within the business. This means information is created digitally, transferred digitally, processed and sold or assessed to create value. We are witnessing the creation of the next digital revolution.
One only needs to look at the advertising industry to see that most successful advertising agencies have either built or partnered with a digital agency, to access new areas of work that didn’t exist prior to the first digital revolution, which was created by building web presence. The challenge now, is to build web integration from front-office through to back-office.
Industries, such as the building trade, that were quick to adopt mobile phones but slow to adopt computers, are now being driven to the web, motivated by the ability to access plans, shop for components, order and review instructions from anywhere via mobile devices such as phones and iPads. The information workers are now scrambling to provide the connections and solutions fast enough to meet demand.
The CIOs surveyed by Gartner identified internal skill gaps as a major impediment to fast progress and hailed outsourcing as the key to success – concluding that they need to shift their thinking from team leadership to management of external contractors for short-term, highly-skilled jobs. These CIOs believe the consistent salaries were less effective than the responsiveness and capabilities of skills-outsourcing and use of contractors. They also claimed that when it comes to career development, they could not train people fast enough to fill the gaps.
Gartner also points out that now technology is integrated into every facet of business, IT projects are no longer just the realm of the IT department – they now have an impact across multiple departments. IT needs to be well represented at the management table and needs to make use of business results and business knowledge to drive IT projects.
All of this wisdom from Gartner is very much in line with my own experiences and will play out strongly as business continues to pick up across the developed nations. If you’re not already reimagining IT for your business, it is probably time to reflect on how you can engage with the next digital revolution, as it unfolds before you.
David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.
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