It’s customary at this time of year for the media commentators to do one of two things:
- A retrospective on what 2010 brought – the events, mishaps and surprises.
- A look forward to 2011 – predictions and forecasts of what will take the world by storm and what, specifically, CIOs will need to be able to grapple with.
We’re well into 2011 now, so here’s our take on what we think the year has in store for senior IT executives, but with a twist. We aren’t technologists; our focus is on what it takes to extract value from technology , and what we believe 2011 will bring is an increasingly loud and clear call for CIOs to go beyond project delivery and ‘keeping the lights on’ – into the whole arena of business value. We see more and more evidence that senior management teams are waking up to the fact that delivering technology projects to time and budget is only part of the story. More and more emphasis is rightly being placed on what you need to do to get value from the system long after the project team has gone away.
Will your IT team surprise you this year?
One of those media predictions for 2011 includes these words: “the IT group, more than other departments, understands how the company works, touching, as it does, every function…..The less you see IT by itself, the more successful we’re being.” What a great opportunity for the IT function to demonstrate to their colleagues the role they can play in delivering benefits for the business as a whole.
Here are three ways we think the CIO or senior IT manager has an opportunity to make their presence felt in 2011.
- Focus on benefits from the very beginning. Most business-IT partnerships start this way, but as the pressure to deliver the project intensifies, the object of the exercise becomes meeting go-live deadlines rather than what it will take to deliver the business case. Have a clear vision, with measures that will tell you when you’ve got there, communicate and engage people in it, and don’t compromise on what it takes to deliver them. Running late against the plan may seem like a nightmare when you’re accountable for the plan, but facing up to the executive team or board when the completed project has failed to deliver the planned benefits is far more likely to damage the business – and your career.
- Think like your users, and draw them into your change project. It goes without saying that assessing and working on the impacts of change from a technology project is core to the change manager’s toolkit. The savvy IT manager will use this approach too. If the IT team really does know the business inside out, then it has a great opportunity to help the business understand for themselves what a new set of systems might bring them.
This might mean that you are positioned as technology gurus, highlighting for pressed business users the ‘art of the possible’, so that you can support them to make it work in ways that will deliver value for them. Or you might take the approach of one of the large newspaper organisations who recently implemented a new HR system for line managers. They looked at what would promote usage of the system and designed a front-end that closely resembled the iPhone and other Apple applications. Only by thinking like their users and actively engaging them in what would work for them, could they boost the chances of long-term value creation. - Surprise the business with the insights you bring. In business, we tend to think surprises are a bad thing, but perhaps in 2011 we can turn that around. One of the large confectionery companies in the UK has been running a major social media campaign. Marketing, Sales and IT have been working closely together to make sure that consumers can access websites and Twitter without a hitch, building a loyal community of fans for their brands. So far, so good – as far as business-IT partnership working is concerned. What has been surprising is the wealth of consumer information that the IT team has been able to deliver. For marketing and sales teams accustomed to laborious research processes, access to real-time information on what consumers are talking about, what’s valuable to them, and what they want to see, has enabled a much faster and more creative response. Market share is rising and there’s a newfound level of respect for what each partner can bring to the common endeavour of product profile and profitability
So those are three of our top pieces of advice for the CIO keen to have an impact on the business in 2011. At Ignite, we work with leaders in IT and across the business to focus on that common objective – building business value.
