I often say that IT departments today can’t just be responders to demand. We have to be shapers of demand. That is easier said than done. Here are a few ways I try to keep IT at the center of our business.
1. Get your business leadership together. IT can no longer wait to be called. We have to work with our business partners to help drive and enable forward-thinking strategies. We have to act deliberately instead of reactively.
2. Work as a partner with the business. Yes, we do work in a technology domain, but in my opinion, we are as important to the business as the commercial leads, the supply chain leads, or the scientists in our R&D organization.
3. Look for technology solutions to business problems. We have to understand our businesses. Beyond simply understanding them, our charter is to bring our expertise around technology and data to business problems, to be business thinkers and even business leaders.
4. Take an external view. Rather than seeing customers as your internal groups, look beyond the enterprise walls. Look at markets where you're not currently playing, look for places you can use IT to help customers in a positive way, and create new revenue opportunities. You'll find yourself thinking much more expansively as someone contributing to shaping the future of the company, not just as someone who meets SLAs.
5. Open IT's black box. If IT seems needlessly complicated, the onus is on IT to change that perception, especially as we pursue digital transformation and introduce new technologies to the picture.
6. Learn from the competition and the customer. Your competitors are using digital capabilities in all kinds of different ways. So are your customers. How many of each can you talk about intelligently within your company?
7. Build digital acumen everywhere. How well are you educating your business partners about the ways they can use technology to run differently? Remember, these are extremely intelligent people with a lot of great ideas. Think of yourself as the bridge between current and higher digital acumen in your company. How could you be running your business differently through predictive analytics, omnichannel marketing, or mobile computing? Get in front of your business colleagues to help them understand the possibilities.
The more experiments that become pilots, the more people get more excited about the opportunities that IT can bring to the table. Best of all, your business partners will trust you more because they see that you're working with them to add more value.
