As the New Year begins, most IT service providers already
have their IT strategy in place. A few
decades ago we heard loud and clear… “You must align IT with the
business”. Then we heard in the next
decade… IT...”You must align with the
business”. Notice the focus was on what
“IT” must do. I believe that most IT
organizations get that. The real
question when considering a strategy is how this can be achieved. Or is it?
I hope that moving forward the new mantra will be “Hello
business”… “You must engage IT in order to ensure success.” If the strategy does not include how the
business is going to consistently engage, plan and strategize with the IT
organization it is possible that the business strategy will not ensure the type
of success that is hoped for and could continue to miss the mark.
A recent BizReport
article by Kristina Knight states; "During 2016, the perception that developers are basement-dwelling,
socially-awkward techies with no grasp on business reality will continue to be
shattered. As "software eats the
world," and as companies change their core competency from "shifting
atoms" to using software to delight customers, developers will become
distributed across lines of business and into the C-suite as they create
business processes in software in real time. As a result, companies will need
to publicly change their image, as well as changing their internal thinking.
While you might not be ready to put developers in the board
room, at the very least we have to consider representation for all areas of the
IT value and delivery stream and how to engage them in the business strategy
and process. This includes Process
Owners, Service Owners, Engineers, Developers and most importantly
representation for the ongoing operations of any service or product.
IT Strategies should instigate action to bust out of silos. Not only Silo’s within IT but we should also
consider the big chasm between the Business side of the house and that of IT
and the technical side of provisioning services. Also as we look forward we can no longer
afford to silo our governance, standards and best practices. We know that business performance is
directly related to IT performance. It
only makes sense to have an integrated strategy. What is your strategy for 2016 and moving
forward? Does it include an integrated
and iterative approach that leverages Agile, Lean and ITSM?
Comments