Break the bottleneck with this new IT/business engagement model- Valutrics

All hands on deck, checks and balances

These five activities are too much for any one individual or team to take on, and giving each to a different owner doesn’t scale, so business engagement has to become a part of everyone’s job and skill set. This flexible, all-hands-on-deck approach to engagement requires an adaptive mindset and skills, as IT employees must be able to handle ambiguity and work without a clear end-state. Many IT employees currently lack this mindset, so it is important that CIOs develop a strategy to upgrade the workforce as part of the transition.

Moving away from a single point of contact who provides these activities as needed should make business leaders’ interactions with IT easier and more effective. But without appropriate checks and balances, the outcome of this new business engagement model can result in duplication and frustration, which doesn’t build a closer working relationship. A common way to make it easier for business partners to reach the support they need is to define IT’s offerings as a series of services or product lines. Each service then supports several or all of the activities in a given domain.

IT leaders can play a key role in the enterprise’s digital transformation. But to do so successfully, they must constantly adapt their approach to collaborating with the rest of the business and provide the right mix expertise based on the digital ability and ambitions of their business partners.

About the author:

Andrew Horne is an IT practice leader at CEB, a best practice insight and technology company. Since joining CEB in 1999, he has authored studies on topics, including IT strategy development, performance and value measurement, business intelligence and big data, IT staff and leadership development and IT innovation.