9April - June, 2020Digitalization offers benefits to almost every area of business, and digital ideas come from all overLetting go of the control that has defined IT is difficult and uncomfortable, but necessary.Your sales organization can go around you and create their CRM at Salesforce.com. Your organization's service teams can purchase SaaS that free them from your cumbersome ERP system. Your engineering group is contracting with its own developers because the IT backlog is so long. Given all of this, what can you do?Be a Service BrokerYour IT organization should be positioned at the nexus of emerging technology, valuable trends, and your business needs. Leverage this expertise to be a service broker. Identify service providers that meet your requirements and include them in your service catalog. Facilitate the interaction of the business with the services, possibly even abstracting the relationship. Make it a value adding service and contract development, SaaS platform purchases, and other ITaaS will run through your shop.Provide Value Added ConsultingYes, every organization is a technology organization and most employees are in roles that heavily use technology. People are pretty smart with this stuff, right? Almost all business projects today have a sizable technology component, and these projects are springing up from sources all over the business. They are mostly good ideas; however their progenitors have little ability to implement. Furthermore the length of time required plan, secure funding and resources, and get scheduled through traditional avenues is often seen as innovation smothering. To break this perception, capitalize on your IT organization's portfolio of internal and external services and mature understanding of how your business operates to help your customers achieve their goals on a reasonable timeframe with less friction.Digital EverythingThe CIO does not exclusively own the digital arena any longer. Digitalization offers benefits to almost every area of business, and digital ideas come from all over. After you master the first two points, you are ready to be a serious player or leader in your organization's digital business strategy. To recap, you are at peace with the fact that IT is happening outside of your IT shop. You have enabled your business's access to services, now within parameters and with visibility of IT. Your IT organization is a part of the digital project flow of other business units rather than something to be worked around. Get in front and lead.Closing the LoopEveryone reading this article knows the technological genie is out of the bottle. There is no going back to the days of dictatorial control IT once wielded. And that's good, because people hated IT much of the time then. This change presents the CIO with the stark choice of either leading the organization through a paradigmatic change or risking the IT shop being commoditized like so many other legacy IT services.My team has not mastered any of this. It's a work in progress, and probably always will be to a degree. Like many of you, I started my career in technology because I enjoyed the pace of change. We're certainly getting waves of change now. You can lead your IT organization through these waves or let it founder into irrelevance. The choice is yours.
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