Author and IT industry veteran Pearl Zhu wrote an interesting blog on the future of the IT leader on her web site. Below is an excerpt from a recent blog she published that we thought would be of interest to our Midsize Enterprise Strategies readers. You can read the entire blog here.
Digital transformation represents the next stage of business maturity which will optimize how the enterprise works and interacts with its ecosystem, with the customer at the center of its focus, and how the business is always on, because employees can get work done from anywhere, anytime, with the right information to make the right decisions. Digital IT needs to become more dynamic and innovative to be a pathfinder for the digital transformation. Here are three dynamic business elements in running a digital IT.
Dynamic leadership: Generally speaking, due to the speed of changes, especially at technology arena, the CIO needs to be a dynamic person with an open mindset and should have both broad business acumen and deep technical expertise as well. A dynamic CIO must have courage to challenge the executive team’s expectations because many businesses end up not delivering value or achieving optimal performance because there are too few executives willing to constructively challenge things. As an IT leader, a CIO’s dynamic persona will directly influence IT and business culture as well, and transform IT from a static support function to a change organization--from a cost center to an innovation engine.
Dynamic capability: IT is a key enabler of capability-based digital strategy. Digital capabilities such as manageability, optimization, automation, agility, and flexibility are dynamic, lego-like, and recombinant. IT must be the super glue in integrating business processes, resources, information and talent into a set of necessary and differentiated digital capabilities that the company needs to implement its strategy and bring high-performance result. The role of IT today for many organizations is a business solution for information management, process automation, and digital orchestration.
Dynamic workforce: With increasing speed of change, the ability to adapt to change also becomes more crucial than ever. This is particularly true for IT employees, due to the disruptive nature of technology and overloading IT workload. Thus, building a dynamic IT workforce with agile learning is a strategic imperative in running a digital IT business, because an adaptive mind has better learning capability. Knowledge management will be a huge factor in the workplace of tomorrow. Building a dynamic workforce means providing a creative working environment with the necessary resources to improve productivity, creativity, and employee engagement.
Pearl Zhu is a digital Thought Leader and the author of "Digital Master" book series which include "Digital Master," "CIO Master," "Digital Valley," "CIO Master," "Digital Agility," and "Leadership Master," etc. with a global vision and more than 21 years of experience in strategic planning, IT, software development, and developing enterprise storage solutions. She advises forward-looking companies to master information technology as competitive tools, build up long-term digital strategy, shape inclusive culture, create a new revenue stream, and takes leadership in the emerging economies
