business
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TALKING
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You can’t anticipate everything in
technology, but you must ensure that you
have the pieces in place to build that out
rather than having to start from scratch every
time. This requires a flexible and adaptable
infrastructure. This can be challenging in
organisations where the primary focus is on
cost-containment, as they tend to provision
the minimum of what they need at the time,
which almost implies minimum flexibility for
the future.
Skills are in short supply and the market is
very competitive. They are hard to retain,
and ongoing training is difficult, but it must
be done creatively and intelligently.
I would recommend that organisations avoid
point skills unless it is absolutely necessary,
and rather ensure that your skills internally
are very broad, that they have collective
exposure across the business and have as
much business context as possible.
Where skills are required for specific
technologies, use subcontractors or
outsourcers, but ensure that, internally,
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you have the integration, business and
management skills to stitch it all together.
The pivot here is to move from focusing on
technical skills to ensure you have the right
integration skills in place.
An evolution driven by business
expectation
From the outside, it’s all about customer
and partner expectations. People expect you
to be able to do business differently and
adjust to meet their expectations in terms of
service delivery, consistency and the ability
to integrate systems.
Internally, people have an expectation and
some knowledge of what is out there in the
market. They see case studies and hear stories
of how organisations can function when
everything is going right, and they want that.
Right now, we are in a place where the
business dictates what the outcome is
going to be and have an expectation
around how that will be serviced,
regardless of how unrealistic the outcome
may be. What we need now is a closer
alignment between business and IT so
that the business understands when
an expectation is unreasonable or an
expectation of a way of doing business is
just incompatible with market conditions
or the regulatory environment.
This evolution is a natural progression in the
business and is an ongoing discussion we
have with CIOs attending our annual IDC
CIO Summit.
What caught IT departments and managers
by surprise was that the business evolved
in unexpected ways, such as the growth
of cloud computing and the CX-oriented
transformation within lines of business.
The business likewise had an expectation
that IT operations would be able to evolve
at the same pace.
That led to a big disconnect, and although
many businesses are over that phase, now
it is about making sure business and IT go
through the next evolution together. n
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