APRIL 2024CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM 19As a business, we must learn new techniques and competencies and train our digital and governing muscles, making them stronger and more agileWhile speed may seem paramount when being in catch-up mode, delivering value to the business should remain the focus. The challenge lies in the fact that deriving value from digital opportunities emerges from many possibilities. The IT team alone cannot convert all of these, leaving money on the table and potentially a new strategic stance. Attempting to cover the entire landscape solely with your IT team will inevitably fall short. Additionally, it is the business people who intimately grasp best their domain insights, challenges, and upsides. So, the value converter lies in harnessing the business horsepower.Therefore, partnering with the business is a must. In the old days, we essentially took orders from the business, went away to develop, and often came back with inadequate solutions, long turnaround times, and frustrations. To improve, we all moved to work more inclusively and agilely. Doing sprints, scrums, and personas, looking at the user experience, focusing on design, minimum viable products, progressing faster, and delivering value in a closer relationship with our internal customers. Still, although much better than the old waterfall-type approach, it is insufficient to address some of the unfulfilled digital opportunity gaps. To really increase that agile leverage, we need to push this effort yet a bit further. Add a new twist to our cocktail recipe.In my opinion, the path forward includes supporting a more democratized and franchised digitalization approach. I am not inventing this but rather embracing it. This means, among other things, creating a new community: the business technologists. Not managed by IT but encouraged and fostered by IT. Business people are encouraged and supported by the business to develop and leverage new technical skills. This entails implementing digital dexterity programs for power users. It means creating self-service catalogs, developing secure views of data sets, designing robust yet flexible governance, collaborating with the business in full-fledged fusion teams, or just helping as IT advisors. It certainly, and in priority, also means developing AI dexterity programs. Generic AI, by itself, deserves an entire chapter. The leverage it will provide is unheard of. Throughout our IT careers, we have trained ourselves to improve stability and tighten our controls for better costs, supportability, and security management. Now, we must find ways to allow some control and entrust creative users to unlock new digital value. We, IT, now have to learn new techniques and new skills. We must train our advisors' and collaborators' muscles for more strength and flexibility. We have to package it in low code, no code mode. We have to think of delivering self-explanatory tech without completing the solution all the way! We have to coach on how to code and how to prompt. As a business, we must learn new techniques and competencies and train our digital and governing muscles, making them stronger and more agile. We have to be tech-savvy to create new digital solutions!It is a natural evolution in our quest to bring more value. It is a paradigm shift in how we make it happen!
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