From Operations Heavy to Opportunity-Maker
Authored by Tamara McCleary, CEO of Thulium.
The following post was sponsored by Cisco. The opinions, thoughts and observations, however, are completely my own.
I’m just off a whirlwind of back-to-back global conferences speaking about digital transformation, and refreshingly I’m beginning to experience discussions around the “how” and not just the “why” of digital transformation. Everyone responsible for transformation within their verticals has to be feeling the flames that have been lit by stakeholder expectations. Mounting challenges are placing pressure on CIO and IT leaders to move their teams from an operations-focus to an opportunity-focus. What does this mean? Historically, IT operations has been delivering on the vision and ideas of others, while focusing on effective and efficient delivery of services.
IT as the Digital Stepchild
While helping to deliver on other department’s visions for innovation technology like Artificial Intelligence, (AI), and machine learning, it’s interesting to discover that IT organizations are often behind the curve on implementing these same types of technologies to their own department. According to ZK Research, 78 percent of IT budgets are spent on “running the business”, leaving only a small fraction to invest on innovation and transformation.
“Actually, digital transformation is mostly led by the CEO or the CMO, and IT is brought in as a support function,” says Ant Newman, Customer Experience (CX) Content Marketing Lead at Cisco, in a recent conversation we had.
The future of the IT organization is one which must build its own vision, and move preemptively to optimize the use of data to not only improve the performance of the organization’s systems, but also IT’s own organizational innovation. To that end, it’s critical for CIOs to build credibility with stakeholders by aligning with the business objectives, and optimizing for transformation enablement.
Rules of Engagement Survey
According to Cisco’s IT Operations Readiness Index (a global research study of 1,500 senior IT leaders), only 14% of IT organizations have reached the highest level of IT operations capabilities, which Cisco calls ‘preemptive’, but 33% expect to have reached preemptive operations within two years.
The Cobbler’s Children Have No Shoes
While budgets have been slim for driving IT transformation, CIOs are pressed to begin transforming their operations. This shift is making surprising differences within the business, differences like inspiring innovation within the organization and increasing customer satisfaction scores. The Cisco IT Operational Readiness Index found “88 percent of IT leaders said their investment in IT operations in the past 12 months had improved external customer satisfaction and 89 percent noted improvements in innovation.”
If only 22% of CIO budgets are driving significant changes in customer satisfaction, imagine the opportunity for transformation with only a modest 5 to 10 percent increase in those budgets. For CIOs who are unable to secure an increase in their budgets, one of the most significant opportunities for immediate impact is focusing on analytics and automation, (which I will go into greater detail in a later blog).
Where Are You on the Operational Readiness Spectrum?
So how can CIOs effectively discover where they rank on operations readiness? Cisco offers a simple, online tool as a companion to the results of the IT Operational Readiness Index called the IT Operations Readiness Assessment. The assessment acts to benchmark IT operations against a peer baseline and then offers recommendations for execution. Access the assessment here.
CIO/IT Leadership Future
Successful digital transformation depends upon leadership and culture. How are you driving changes within your organization? How are you aligning with your organization’s growth objectives? If you’re supporting all the other lines of business visions, what have you done for you and your teams lately? Are you tracking your initiatives to customer outcomes such as satisfaction? The future depends on every LOB harnessing technology for actionable insights to drive business growth. The opportunity is here for the CIO / IT leader to step into an elevated level of mastery through harnessing the power of technology. To remain relevant tomorrow, the imperative is to move from operations-heavy to opportunity-maker, revealing actionable insights to deliver on business growth.
Article originally posted on LinkedIn.
