Navigating the IT Shift, by Bruce Rogow

Over the past 50 years, IT has been described in many different ways, with monikers ranging from DP, MIS, IS or decision support systems, re-engineering and, most recently, avoid getting “Amazon-ed.” This revolving door of titles is a direct reflection of shifts in priority, focus and delivery. The next disruption, driven by digital technologies, will no doubt spawn a new moniker, and along with that, it will bring about huge changes in every aspect of your business.

These changes will greatly enhance front-end user experiences, work flow automation and back-office data processing and analysis. But they will also require IT and operations to be more closely aligned and in sync in terms of goals. What changes can we expect to see in IT organizations moving forward? Is your team prepared for this game changing shift in technologies?

Getting there from here

It usually makes more sense for a company that came up before digital technologies took root to take an incremental approach. In other words, to aim at becoming a “digitally enhanced business” rather than attempting to convert the entire business overnight. But whatever the approach, here are the transformational challenges you will most likely encounter:

1. Radical change happens over time and with proper planning, deployment, engagement and adoption, not by throwing new technologies at the business to see if they stick.

2. Material, beneficial change begins with critical alterations to the business and operating models. You want to automate your best practices.

3. When approaching a large project, have a clear long term vision, roll out enhancements in small increments and be persistent with your assimilation and adoption. The resulting benefits typically emerge from an evolving mixture of inter-related existing technologies, upon which new tools, applications, capabilities, behavior and business models are successfully applied.

4. Many existing businesses have been dramatically enhanced by the current avalanche of social, mobile, analytics and cloud (the SMAC Stack) technologies and the IoT. These new enablers are responsible for some of the most radical business and operating model changes I’ve seen so far.

Transformation begins with…

The most dramatic changes I’ve seen involved broad and profound business model transformations. Let me share a few examples:

• A cyclical-industry manufacturer: When this company realized it could not gain on its competition in favorable economic times, it spent a decade using leading technologies and processes to reduce its break-even by over 30%. It applied big data analytics to better forecast demand, improve supply chains and rationalize piece parts. These efforts drove completely new product engineering, manufacturing engineering, shop floor, fabrication, robotics and materials handling approaches. At the end of the next recession, the company was the only major player left standing.
• A transportation company: This company understood that the key to its success was based on end-to-end performance guarantees and economics based on cross-industry transactions, assurance of on-time delivery and real-time alternative sourcing. Therefore, it rebuilt its business model to establish a digitally based cross-industry platform that integrated with the systems of a galaxy of specialty logistics stakeholders. The company also realized that information about and insights revealed by the transactions would be as important as the shipments themselves; therefore, it worked to become a master of analytics and has gone on to industry domination.
• A consumer-focused financial advisory services company: Rather than build a supermarket of financial products, this company rebuilt its business model around the vision of how a specific class of consumers work and live. It spent over a decade building the enabling infrastructure, client life experience services, business partner extensions, consumer-friendly analytics and seamless interactions that ultimately became a hub for its clients. Today, this company’s services are embedded in the lifestyles of all targeted clients.

Preparing your organization for IT changes

In every case, change pivoted around a new business model, took over a decade to complete, and demanded relentless incremental changes that ultimately resulted in major material changes in business capabilities.

As a business or IT leader, how are you properly and realistically preparing your organization for the future?

If you would like to read about specific lessons learned of how to prepare for this next radical change in IT, download my latest article. Please let me know your thoughts and input on this topic.

Opinions expressed in this blog are of the author and may not represent Cognizant’s point of view.

Bruce Rogow

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Originally published at digitally.cognizant.com on September 29, 2016.