A new breed of IT Strategy has emerged
Developing an IT strategy has traditionally been a cyclical process, in response to either a known technology shift (e.g. ERP systems coming to end of life) or a business-driven requirement (e.g. M&A activity, growth and international expansion, efficiency and cost-reduction programmes).
These drivers remain critically important but the advent of the fast paced ‘digital revolution’ has added new dimensions to developing an IT strategy:
- An annual or multi-year cycle no longer works; you need a dynamic and responsive approach to IT strategy development
- Customer interfaces are becoming ever more digitised, throwing IT into the forefront of business operations
- Consumers are generating data at an astronomical rate, from which businesses can derive previously unavailable insight, and so enable customisation of their products and services
- Technology is being used in different ways, to develop new products and services rather than just support business operations.
The IT function can only support this if they are truly integrated with their business customer and have the capabilities and capacity to respond quickly. As well as closer business partnering, we have seen a shift towards “bi-modal” ways of working, a merger of development and operations (“DevOps”) and an organisational shift from functional IT to product centric teams.
In many sectors, IT is fast moving from supporting the business to being the business. Not only has IT moved from a being a passive support function to an enabler of growth in recent years; it is now becoming the power-house of growth. And as the IT strategy increasingly sits at the heart of the business strategy, so the role of the CIO is fundamentally beginning to shift.