| | Oct 20199to-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 20years. 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 function. The adaptability to smarter digital processes enabled by technology solutions varies in the organization and one of the prime factors of that as per my personal experience have been the degree of technology acceptance and appreciation, and to some extent personal exposure of the head of the function. Every technology adoption pitch used to have one common message in their slide deck "this program needs to be supported by the top management." I used to believe in this in the early years of my career. What it implied was that command and control is very hierarchical. The new age innovative corporations now put more emphasis on flatter and network type of organizations wherein creativity and innovation has maximum effect closer to customer delivery processes. With this approach now, any digital program need to have a genesis from the grass roots levels to improve the KPI's of the value chain workflows. Sometimes what needs to be transformed is not visible to many levels up as they are far removed from the realities of the end processes. They are mostly influenced by IT Marketers selling them dream. Hence the true and tangible drive and need identification for change has to be felt strongly by the middle level of the organization and they need to lead the change into the CXO community. IT function need to align and collaborate with these champions of change and help them achieve the outcomes which can move the needle for the business performance. Planning and organizing a digital competence program across the mid and lower levels of the organization can help drive the overall digitalization agenda. The digital competency across the organization both in IT and in business is the key success factor for achieving a sustainable adoption of a digitally transformed business operation. Smarter systems need smarter people to extract the value and generate successful business outcomes. ECSmarter systems need smarter people to extract the value and generate successful business outcomes
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