| | NOVEMBER 202019E ERGYTech ReviewA a CIO and CTO, I have been facing the challenge to design, build and deploy smart systems which can flex and scale with the business and help the business processes to deliver optimum efficiencies possible. While the mandates from the top management and from the peer CXO's is very clear, the journey to achieving real tangible success depends on several factors. In this article I would like to deal with these challenges and see if we can collaborate as practitioners to find smarter solutions for the same. IT for IT Let's start with the IT Function first, because if we don't transform IT we cannot enable or help our peers in the business to deliver their corporate objectives. Also there has been a traditional wisdom that charity begins at home. We need to review what delivery processes, organizational competencies, skill sets, tools, techniques, architecture principles, team collaboration exists in our own function. We need to design and build a function aligned to the industry sector that we exist for. For e.g. a B2C organization needs a fundamentally different approach than a B2B. It should also vary depending on the size, geographical spread, age, market position, maturity cycle, future aspirations (if the board level strategic vision exist?) etc of the business itself. Traditional IT has been an asset focused function. With changing tech developments and innovations the services mind-set transformation of IT itself is a journey of sorts. Building and leveraging supplier relationships to augment the IT function delivery capability is becoming more and more important as its very difficult for end user organizations to maintain such skill pools and keep them up-to-date at all times. This is both a boon and a curse as by external augmentation we can deliver faster but the costs of delivery is higher and fraught with quality concerns. Supplier performance at optimal costs is one of the top 5 challenges of all CIO's / CTO's that I have met in last 20 years. Every organization has a unique outlook and perspective towards their technology and IT functions. There is considerable degree of variation of the value perception. Transforming that perspective does take time as we need to struggle with IT transformation in parallel to delivering the BAU and new digital tools. Nowhere, can we get the liberty of stopping from delivering to improve the IT Services. I believe morphing into a services focussed function while continuing to lead and deliver digitalisation is the key characteristic of a successful IT for IT program. IT for BusinessIT suffers an enigma from its past failures in terms of responding quickly to business requirements. This response time and rate is also something which needs striking a fine balance, as too much speed and not thinking through some of the TCO aspects, long term scalability of the platform, appropriate fit for the business, etc. can cause lack of long term sustainability of the deployed solution rendering it as a legacy application dumped by users and moved on to next. Too slow, and the business will find alternate short cuts/shadow IT solutions internal or external which will lead to pushing the IT function value lower into the business value chain. These cycles of delivery case studies in the organization often vary based on function to Digital Competence Prelude to Digital TransformationBy Raahil Burhaani, CIO, Essar Oil UK LtdSmarter systems need smarter people to extract the value and generate successful business outcomesCIO INSIGHTS
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