more than eager to collaborate with IT to accelerate the Digital journey. The Digital maturity led by CEO and ably supported by CIO and other CXOs kept them going and even further widened the gap between them and their traditional IT enabled competitors. These organizations turned crisis into an opportunity. These CIOs are on their path to become COOs/CEOs In the Offing.
Ferns & Petals is one such organization which turned this crisis into an opportunity, by innovating their business model and started to offer Digital Services. Initially they faced a sudden drop of 80% in orders. The crisis triggered innovation of the Business Model by CTO and CXOs and led to an increase of 18% revenue during the lockdown itself. Enclosed is the interview of Fern N Petals CTO published in Economic Times. And there are many more organizations in this league.
While some other organizations struggled to sustain the continuity of business operations, the decibel levels of blame game between Business & IT increased further. Customers, Suppliers, Business & IT all suffered during this period and possibly long-term damage has already been done to such
organizations with consumers switching to other options. As usual, CIOs are likely to be the scapegoat in such organisations and CIO may be on the path to “Career Is Over”.
In the ongoing Digital Era, even in the absence of any external crisis, Business Models will rise and fall at a tremendous speed and rate of transformation is only going to accelerate with time. As leaders, if you don’t transform and use this technology differently - if you don’t reinvent yourself, change your organization structure; if you don’t talk about speed of innovation - you’re going to get disrupted. And it will be a brutal disruption, where the majority of companies will not exist in a meaningful way 10 to 15 years from now.
We need Leaders in VUCA world and not Managers. Leaders who have the vision & courage to experiment and capability to lead Cultural & Professional Movement in the organization, share the Purpose with the Knowledge Workers, Empower them with Mastery ( skill-sets, technology & tools) and provide them Autonomy, and then the Knowledge Workers will keep amazing the organizations with innovations.
Yes!, we also need to dis-intermediate our organizations and keep bare minimum management layers to bring agility and boost balance sheet by cutting the unwanted high cost Managers.
We have proven technology & vendor neutral IT Best practices & methodologies, which need to be leveraged in an integrated manner to chart the Digital journey. These have become more relevant than ever before because of heightened risks in the VUCA world :