The increasing realization gaps and performance gaps across IT organizations is taking attrition levels to new highs. Also these gaps are wrongly decoded and IT governance has confined itself to technological advances rather than restructuring the organizations; which has remained a myth of late.
Today IT organizations require enterprise-wide change in order to effectively align them with businesses and profit fundamentals. The top management needs to be more tactical in nature and be able to address ongoing initiatives in a descriptive manner. An effective dashboard governance is the root to create quick-win situations for IT organizations in a highly competitive environment.
The foundation for restructuring the IT organization can be laid through a proper channel; a crude roadmap can be as follows:
The Thinking Cap
The new dashboard for IT governance will be a common platform for formation of bridge between verticals and domains and also across companies. One of the important characteristics of the new strategy is that it will effectively realign your resources and make them readily available. This can be done through multitasking.
Segmenting our resources in IT organizations is a tough ask today because many of the necessary skills are not always readily available. Today the IT organizations aren’t encouraging multitasking, and are accustomed to merely “doing” than “thinking” and “envisioning”.
The IT organizations as of now are having a clear divide between IT and business. The business provides the IT with the list of services and system requirements and it is the sole responsibility of IT to cater to the needs and deliver those requirements as effectively as possible. So it is merely the “doing” which is largely outplaying any new innovations. It is high time that the IT organizations need to wear the thinking cap and focus on creating competitive advantage for the enterprise with innovative thinking and envisioning new frontiers along with the emerging technologies and just not catering to the existing business needs.
Today IT organizations are at war with improvisation and innovation because of:
Businesses and users are driving the new technology adoptions and IT is struggling to keep up – IT organizations have limited themselves to technological agendas. Earlier IT was responsible for researching and discovering new ways to make organizations more efficient and it regulated and controlled the technology acquisitions and the roll-out processes. Now, technology is moving so fast that IT organizations can’t keep up.
IT organizations focused on infrastructure issues since application purchases are now made by end-users – Today IT doesn’t care to control application evaluation process. Now users are driving application adoption and they are doing it at a pace that suits their needs and not that of IT. The IT professionals are finding it difficult to cope up with the pace of technology advancement.
The IT dashboard which has undergone many changes in the past subject to requirements needs to be rebuilt yet again. The pace of technology advancements can be met only with a dashboard which incorporates or rather encompasses varied aspects of a project – inclusive of all verticals and domains. A particular business is compartmentalized into various aspects which can now be clubbed in one dashboard: The new IT Governance Centre
The new Dashboard governance for IT organizations will rope in unlimited benefits and will also facilitate effective follow up of the fast changes in the technology domain as well.
This new thinking cap for IT organizations will:
-Exploit new technologies to create and pursue new business opportunities; also identifies these opportunities proactively
-Counter all aspects of a new viable project with a consolidated approach
-Use Time and Resource management tools to evaluate these technologies and the resulting opportunities to determine their value to, and impact on, existing and potential business
-Use financial management tool and budget analysis to look out for the feasibility for new innovations and the financial health associated with it.
-Appropriately adapts itself to changes in the environment on a ongoing basis.
-Using project and portfolio management tools to embrace innovative mechanisms to access and utilize the best possible assets.
As a result of this dashboard upgrade, IT organizations will now be responsible for exploring and deploying new technologies to drive business transformation. It will involve selecting and defining new technology architectures and configurations to meet the needs of the customers, also at the same time pursuing improvement of the capabilities, processes and delivery strategies of the organizations continuously. IT organizations can now use this new dashboard governance to engage more customers for the organization – both internal and external, and suppliers and business partners to create new business possibilities and enhance process efficiencies.
The Dimensional Changes
The new IT dashboard governance should also be accompanied with a few dimensional changes to make the new dashboard act efficiently. Infosys Business Consulting has chartered a new change management system across the organization to improve growth and performance through all hierarchies. It is only through this radical change that IT organizations can better prepare themselves for technological/business challenges and guide their enterprise towards competitive success. Some of them are:
Procedural Changes: The IT organizations should get out from technical thinking to a business bend of mind. The technical aspects need to be engrossed in business thinking.
Structural Changes: Organization structures should no longer be rigid and hierarchical which slows down the vertical growth and thinking; there must be more flexibility in the structure to facilitate all round growth.
Leadership changes: Leadership/Management across IT organizations should change from being operational to being transformational.
Cultural Changes: Employees in organizations should be risk taking rather than risk averse. Risk taking accompanied with proper risk management enhances growth and productivity of organizations.
Attitudinal Changes: IT organizations also require an change in attitude – from just being doers to being thinkers, enablers and doers.
While the primary goal of IT organizations will remain doing, but thinking and enabling before doing will provide a platform for insurmountable growth. To make a better IT ecosystem, these changes in an IT organization is a must. Such an IT ecosystem makes a large, virtual pool of skills and resources available to the IT organization for performing its various roles.
The transformation of the IT organization through the new dashboard governance along with the dimensional changes must be a part of a greater organizational transformation to make the corporate mindset more accepting and embracing of change. The IT organization therefore has a role to play by evangelizing the power and capability of technology for driving greater competitive advantage across the business organization.
[The article has been written by Partha Pratim. He is an MBA from Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur (2011-13 batch). He graduated in Mechanical Engineering from BIT Sindri in 2008. He has worked with a leading MNC in the IT/ITeS sector as a Systems Engineer. ]
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