7 Tips on How to Build a Stronger Business/IT Partnership
To create the organizational resilience necessary in this new normal, businesses need to stop thinking of IT teams as just expensive gatekeepers.
IT departments remain largely synonymous with cost centers. So, when times get tough, companies often look to IT to make budget cuts. However, studies show that it is the companies that lean into IT that are best prepared to weather moments of disruption and uncertainty. A survey of Fortune 500 CEOs, for example, found that the crisis hasaccelerated digital transformation for 63% of those companies. In these moments, IT becomes a business partner, driving innovation.
With emerging technologies like the cloud, low-code and artificial intelligence, IT can deploy revenue-generating products and services within days, passing data to people when and where they need it. This extreme agility and efficiency are especially important in our new normal: an almost entirely virtual and digital omnichannel world.
If you haven’t turned IT into a revenue driver just yet or you’re looking to improve your business play, here are seven tips.
A strong operational backbone starts with technologies that give you the flexibility to distribute autonomy, align agile teams, build rapid processes, and have a continuous release development cycle. This creates seamless end-to-end transaction processing, leading to reliable, consistent master data. With it, organizations can continually innovate.
The backbone should also include centralized visibility into transactions and processes, enabling distributed teams to spin up new products and services.
Strong leaders guide businesses that continuously introduce products that change our lives and the way we think about what businesses can do. These leaders give their reports authority and power to create — and they give their teams leeway to fail.
To turn IT into a business partner, IT leaders must work closely with the marketing and customer success leads, building a coordinated team. IT needs to design technologies that are valued by customers, which requires incorporating feedback from other areas of the business to ensure the digital strategy aligns with customer expectations.
If every request goes through IT in a single queue, it gets bogged down. Traditional interactions between people, process, and technology limit the ability to learn quickly, fail fast, and try new approaches to solving business problems. Winning in the digital age takes a more distributed approach with agile teams. When IT is set up to pivot quickly, it can support last minute business needs or brand-new ideas.
