In the post-digital enterprise, analytics, mobile, social, cloud, and networking will be the new competitive foundations. This upcoming change provides CIOs with the opportunity to become the CEO's most trusted advisor.
It's the best of times and the worst of times for CIOs. Five macro forces – analytics, mobile, social, cloud, and networking – are disrupting the nature of IT and bringing businesses into the post-digital era.
As IT becomes a utility to manage as a distributed function across the enterprise, the CIO role may become irrelevant. But CIOs also have the opportunity to be a catalyst for business transformation, a trusted advisor to help CEOs navigate the digital business environment.
The post-digital era, like the post-industrial era, reflects the 'new normal' of business and the new basis for competition," said Mark White, principal and chief technology officer at Deloitte Consulting. "In the post-industrial era, we have not given up on industrialization, but embraced it. The post-digital era is similar, but with digitalization at its core. ”
White believes that over the next 18 to 24 months, the convergence and controlled collision of these five macro forces will enable enterprises to achieve a post-digital enterprise, where all five forces are matured, implemented, integrated, and integrated, rather than fixed.
It's an unusual time, and there are five forces — all new, all evolving, all technology-centric — that are already having such a strong impact on business," White said. "This is an opportunity for the IT department to create extraordinary value with modest investments on a strong legacy foundation of technology. ”
White said this will change operating models, capabilities, and even business models. The post-digital enterprise is not one where digitalization has completely ended; It's a digital enterprise. On the contrary, like industrialization in the post-industrial era, these digital forces will become the new basis for competition.
CIOs are poised to be the forerunners of the post-digital transformation.
Suketu Gandhi, head of Deloitte Consulting, and Bill Briggs, director of Deloitte Consulting, wrote in the firm's recently released report, "Technology Trends 2013: The Post-Digital Element," that CIOs are in a unique position to be pioneers of change. Serve as a catalyst for the entire executive team, helping others understand the boundaries of what's possible. Forcing thinking beyond existing solutions and processes. Take responsibility for transformation. ”
Gandhi and Briggs point out that the relationship between business and IT is almost always complex. After all, technology may be at the heart of most business strategies today, but IT is also a high-profile cost center and often the single largest expense on the balance sheet.
A recent Gartner study found that 45% of IT leaders now report to the CFO. Shrinking budgets, businesses are becoming less tolerant of long-term IT projects, and end users are increasingly setting expectations for reliability and availability based on consumer products rather than enterprise systems.
At the same time, the five forces of post-digitalization are changing the nature of IT," Gandhi and Briggs said. "Mobile devices break the physical location-based limitations. Users now expect that the power of the enterprise should be available at the point of decision-making and the point of business transaction – whether at the point of decision-making. Social is flattening internal hierarchies, rewriting the possibilities of global collaboration within and outside organizational boundaries, and allowing consumers to interact as individuals (within which the customer base is).
Analytics is unlocking insights from data to support human decision-making—from big data and transactional data to visualization techniques to drive descriptive, prescriptive, and prescriptive decisions and actions. The cloud has changed the economics and pace of technology investments. On the subscriber side, more and more services are available for subscription, and their acquisition model is resilient in terms of cost and capacity.
On the provider side, the cloud offers the opportunity to monetize information and services in new ways – new or adjacent business models for many industries, not just high-tech,** and entertainment. Cybersecurity and privacy are part of an ongoing conversation – leading innovation in emerging areas before regulatory issues while tackling growing threats. ”
Leveraging post-digital transformation requires more than just a mindset shift.
Gandhi and Briggs say harnessing these powers and turning them into opportunities requires more than just a change of mindset. This requires fundamental changes in the way CIOs budget portfolio management, IT delivery, information disciplines, integration, business management, architecture and skills, and human capital.
Gandhi and Briggs point out that most organizations have a rigorous investment process that requires a clearly defined business case and requirements that are evaluated at several scheduled times of the year. While this process is well developed to support large, multi-year initiatives, it is not well suited for the post-digital era. Instead, CIOs need to adopt more agile and responsive planning and prioritization capabilities, as well as project, portfolio, and IT financial management disciplines.
Similarly, waterfall delivery has evolved to support long-running and wide-ranging projects, but is problematic for smaller, dynamic projects.
Create a SWAT team with a variety of skills, including some that may not be familiar to your IT department," Gandhi and Briggs said. "In addition to business leaders, technical engineers, QA resources, and project managers, graphic designers, UX engineers, and even anthropologists and cognitive psychologists are able to develop your own agile style. In the post-digital world, business owners react by showing, not telling. Cultivate ideas, develop working prototypes with core concepts, and deepen thinking about what you want and need through hands-on experiments. ”
In terms of information disciplines, data management, management, association, cleaning, analysis, and visualization will become more critical disciplines in the post-digital era. Gandhi and Briggs say the "informatization" of the business should be at the top of the CIO's agenda. CIOs need to help businesses move from siloed processes to service-based capabilities with metrics that matter.
At the same time, integration and orchestration become the building blocks of IT organizations in the post-digital enterprise. A dynamic middle tier capable of managing end-to-end transactions between traditional on-premises packages, emerging technologies, and cloud solutions will become critical. Gandhi and Briggs point out that flexibility in quality of service, transaction management, degree of routing certainty, business rules, and policy management can be critical.
At the same time, CIOs can't afford to ignore business management. Managing contracts, licenses, subscriptions, service levels, updates, patches, and release schedules will be top priorities.
The Port of Long Beach utilizes all five forces.
Doug Albrecht, Director of Information Management at the Port of Long Beach, had to consider all of these factors and more. The port is well on its way to leveraging analytics, mobile, social, cloud, and networking.
On the mobile side, it is still developing smartphone and tablet apps, although it plans to eventually give everyone, from executives to engineers on the job site, access to the port's systems anytime, anywhere. It has widely deployed mobile sensors and machine-to-machine technology, from sensors for detecting and other potential sources of infrastructure damage, to RFID tags that control truck entry terminals, and sewer and stormwater control sensors for measuring performance and environmental impact and monitoring safety.
It also integrates sensor data into an analytics package with an operational dashboard that can track ships coming in and out of port, all linked to a billing system. Among other uses, it uses these analyses to develop incentive programs that automatically offer incentive discounts to ships that manage their speed near ports.
For business continuity, resiliency, and ease of maintenance, the Port of Long Beach deployed a private cloud. Albrecht also noted that the port will eventually be migrated to the public cloud.
I'd rather let my team worry about port traffic than the memory needed for a new server," he said.
The port is only just beginning to experiment with external marketing using social, but Albrecht says it has already deployed a sophisticated project management system in-house, creating a source of information for large capital projects. Albrecht's team also implemented unified communications and soon plans to combine it all with mobile devices.
Finally, cybersecurity is a focus. Albrecht noted that the port, which is part of the U.S. Coast Guard Cyber Command Center, has implemented hardened shells and deployed multiple in-depth tools and techniques. Albrecht's team also focuses on employee training in safety.
I have three pieces of advice for CIOs," Albrecht said
First, know which team you're on. I came to realize that my team at the port included both IT staff and directors who were responsible for the rest of the business. In order to do my job well, I should understand what they are doing and communicate clearly with them. We invite port supervisors to our IT staff meetings to get to know them and learn how to better support their needs and build a foundation of trust. Second, develop your employees. Teach them leadership, communication, and how business runs. Third, trust your employees to do what they're supposed to do. This will free up time for you to go out and see what else is going on. It's important to be well-read, but it's not enough. It's critical to meet and interact with other IT executives to bring back ideas that will continue to make post-digital forces more valuable to your business. ”
How can CIOs be post-digital catalysts?
There is no simple blueprint for becoming an agent of change, but Gandhi and Briggs do offer some advice. First and foremost, start by doing a self-assessment of your relationships with other executives. Find out how people perceive IT, their views on how IT can create value for the organization, their views on the power of post-digitalization, what they plan to do, and how they want to partner with IT to reap the benefits. Then take these four steps:
Seed innovation. Gandhi and Briggs suggested the creation of a dedicated department for research and development within the organization. Explore the five post-digital forces and identify specific ways to apply them to improve your business. Ask vendors and other business partners for real-world examples with real results.
Have the necessary conversations. Continue the dialogue with the functional lead. Understand their priorities, get feedback, and discuss the potential of post-digital power based on real-world use cases you've discovered.
Re-equipping. You may not be quite ready to transition to a post-digital enterprise right now. Your organization will require new business and technical skills, and possibly new architectures.
Prototype. Plan big, start small, fail fast and scale appropriately. Gandhi and Briggs suggested basing the project on business objectives and simple metrics, and enlisting a single, empowered business owner who could guide the overall direction and tactical decisions of the project. Pilot as soon as possible and get user feedback to guide the way forward.
The CIO of the future may look a lot like a venture capitalist – upholding the principles of sound investing, defining the boundaries of deals, and driving funding, staffing, and strategic support based on changing needs and strategies. The emerging value of individual initiatives," Gandhi and Briggs said.
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