Transforming IT for digital success

But Pillai notes that his innovation mandate doesn’t exist only for this team; he wants his whole staff, including those working on standard IT operations, to learn new tech and push boundaries.

He also created a position called business-aligned service delivery manager, of which there are about 40, with the role focused on “hearing what our customers’ problems are and then figuring out how to get technology to help them. This is a deliberate attempt for us to be in the customers’ space.”

4. Change IT’s perspective of itself

To truly drive continuous transformation, University of Montana CIO Zach Rossmiller believes that IT teams can’t see innovation as just another task; rather, he says all IT teams must learn to see themselves as innovators who use technology to enable enterprise success.

He’s pursuing that perspective shift with his own staff.

“The idea of IT as a strategic thought partner to drive digital innovation and success is something I’ve pushed my staff to buy into. That we can drive change because we know the backend processes, we know the systems,” he says. “That’s something that’s sometimes hard to do in IT.”

Rossmiller, who once had a team member ask what improving student retention has to do with IT work, has stepped up to meet the challenge. He has implemented various approaches to reshape how his team sees itself. For example, he has focused on better explaining how technology’s performance affects student experiences and, thus, key business performance indicators such as student retention. And IT leaders now do annual goal-setting, quarterly check-ins, and monthly updates to gauge whether and how much IT’s work has impacted university goals.

“Every year the university releases its annual playbook with its priorities, and we look at those priorities, list out the projects we’re working on, and ask whether they align. And if they don’t, we rethink them; if they do, we highlight that this is what drives student success, research excellence, etc.,” Rossmiller says. “And once you start getting them to see how their daily jobs drive the university’s mission, that’s when you start seeing success.”

He recently had one IT staffer surface issues with identity management, pointing out that the university’s older ID management system was a problem for everyone — from the users to the IT workers frustrated with supporting the ancient architecture.

Rossmiller says he appreciated his worker’s ability to highlight a problem and advocate for doing better, both of which he sees more often in his IT today versus several years ago.

“That shows that they get the reasons why we’re here, that we’re not just a utility. We are agents for driving change,” he says.

5. Develop a startup mentality

IT needs to abandon large all-hands-on-deck kind of endeavors for nimble, smaller teams like those that exist in startups, says Saurajit Kanungo, co-author of the book Demystifying IT and president of CG Infinity, a boutique IT consulting firm.

Kanungo says CIOs must reduce the too-many formal interactions that happen and drive faster decision-making. “Start with a Navy SEAL approach rather than taking a whole army approach,” he says, “because developing a startup mentality even though you’re a huge corporation and taking a Navy SEAL approach has huge value.”

To demonstrate that value, he points to the success a large century-old company had when transforming into a digital entity; instead of creating a new unit or hiring up a lot of new talent, the CEO had a small group of staffers first create a digital platform and then scale up as the platform generated increasing opportunities and revenue. The success of that platform eventually transformed the business into a digitally-led company.

Kanungo says a whole army approach doesn’t enable the agility required in the modern digital age where markets rapidly change. “You can’t have 60 people in a two-hour meeting and think you’re going to make decisions and move on. Even 20 people in a meeting takes too long. It will take too long to even get everyone on the same page,” he says.

Kanungo favors that startup/Navy SEALS mentality not only because the teams are smaller than whole armies but also because they have a camaraderie that delivers results. Bigger teams that pull in workers from all different departments, hoping to break down siloes, are well intentioned, he explains, but “you then have an amalgamation of people brought into a project who don’t normally work with each other. And they have not developed this camaraderie, so you spend a lot of time just trying to gain momentum, where even aligning people to the common goal and what needs to be done is a massive exercise.

“Which is why I go back to the Navy SEAL approach. They are a mission-focused team and they’re able to stay mission focused because of their size and camaraderie.”

6. Advance the use of agile

IT has adopted new ways of working in past years as part of its own ongoing transformation — one of which is the use of agile methodologies for delivering tech functions and capabilities.

That move to agile has indeed helped IT respond faster to business needs and market demands, but many IT departments see the need to do better with their use of agile, says Andy Sealock, a senior partner at West Monroe, a digital-services consulting firm.

“Moving from waterfall [development methodologies] to agile has been going on for a while, but most enterprises aren’t done with that journey yet,” Sealock says.

In fact, he sees many organizations using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) or some similar framework to introduce agile only in some areas, with the plan to scale their use of agile over time.

That can work for a time, as can using the conventional waterfall approach for some IT projects, but Sealock says IT needs to mature its use of agile and DevSecOps to remain competitive.

“The traditional way of doing things takes too long for the digital products people want to use, and by the time a project rolls out, it’s too late, the market has moved on,” he says.

Sealock advises CIOs to provide the training and tools required for their IT teams to work more fully in an agile fashion and to educate their business-side colleagues on their role in this way of working with IT, too.

7. Embrace a product-based approach

Others also cite the need for IT to move from a project-based delivery approach to a product-based one, where IT teams are organized around specific technology products instead of infrastructure or architecture components as they had been throughout much of IT’s history.

Most are on this journey, says Mike Shaklik, partner and global head of CIO advisory at Infosys Consulting. Still, only a fraction of the organizations have a mature product environment with responsibility for success shared between IT and business teams, he says.

“I think there’s still much more work to be done,” he adds.

Of course, some workers within IT will always remain focused on managing technology infrastructure and systems, Shaklik says. But CIOs need to move more of their teams away from TechOps and organize them instead around digital products and services, where the measures of success are how well those technology capabilities meet business needs rather than traditional IT success metrics.

“The difference with product teams is their business orientation,” he explains. “A product approach creates a tighter integration of IT and business resources to deliver on problem statements. It moves IT away from thinking of on time and on budget as signs of success and moves IT instead to understanding what they need to create to deliver value.”