When it comes to all the challenges facing IT organizations these days, there is no shortage of issues to focus on--everything from retiring legacy systems to figuring how to do more with less. Given the competing priorities, it's critically important for IT organization to focus their efforts on the initiatives that will have the most strategic impact on the business.
With that said--and to that end--there are things every IT organization should do to enable their business partners to succeed:
1. Get Relevant
Far too many IT organizations are on the outside looking in when it comes to the business processes that are driven by IT. Companies clearly now appreciate how IT can be used to disrupt a business, but that puts the onus on the IT department to make sure it is aligned with the business in a way that enables IT to be a lot more proactive than it has historically been.
“A lot of people tend to overlook this issue, but IT teams really need to get to know the organizations they work for,” says Dennis Drogseth, an industry analyst with Enterprise Management Associates. “That means really understanding where all the inter-dependencies are across the business.”
With that in mind, business leaders want to work with IT professionals who can leverage technology in a way that provides the business with a truly competitive advantage. But, as Drogseth notes, that can’t happen if the IT organization doesn’t intimately understand the business.
2. Get Control
Thanks largely to the rise of “shadow IT”—where technology hardware and software is brought into the organization without IT's involvement—data is distributed across any number of silos inside and out of the cloud. In the coming year, IT organizations of all sizes will need to implement a deliberate hybrid cloud computing strategy. The challenge is that most IT organizations are not prepared for it.
“IT organizations today don’t have the best practices and tools in place to manage hybrid clouds,” says Allan Krans, senior analyst with Technology Business Research. “They’re not even sure what the use cases are for it yet.”
The thing to remember is that it'll be next to impossible to use IT as a competitive weapon if the data needed to drive a particular business process is inaccessible to the applications that drive the rest of the business.
3. Get Agile
At the same time, when it comes to being able to respond to competitive threats and take advantage of new business opportunities, most IT organizations are simply too slow. Users just won't wait—and, with the plethora of easily and often freely available tech options out there, they don't have to. Individual business units wind up contracting any number of cloud services, thereby creating even more silos of data.
The only way to put an end to that vicious IT cycle is to implement agile methodologies, spanning everything from how applications are developed to the way IT infrastructure is provisioned.
“Agile is about building a culture rather than just implementing a process,” says John Rudd, president of SolutionsIQ, an IT consulting firm. “It’s about continuous innovation.”
For many IT organizations, that may very well mean blowing up the organization chart--starting in 2015 with the convergence of application development and IT operating teams around the management of specific business processes.
4. Get Smart
All the business intelligence (BI) in the world isn’t worth anything unless it’s actually actionable. Organizations have spent billions of dollars on legacy BI applications running on data warehouses that do little to make the business actually run better. With that advent of everything from big data platforms to cognitive computing services, data can now actually translate into business power.
The challenge is that IT departments need to exercise the political will required to drive those kinds of investments.
“The tools are out there,” says Joe Clabby, principal with Clabby Analytics. “But it’s an executive management issue in terms of willingness to make the investment.”
Organizations that don't make the investment may soon find the business challenged to the point of extinction.
5. Get Mobile
Smartphones and tablets are not just about giving people remote access to email and calendaring services. They are about building and deploying applications that take latency out of business processes by moving them closer to the customer.
Whether a mobile application is for employees or customers, the real challenge is making sure the application can actually engage with back-end enterprise services in a meaningful way.
“Mobile becomes the primary way companies are going to engage with their customers,” says Judith Hurwitz, principal for Hurwitz & Associates. “The problem is that mobile in the enterprise right now is quite disjointed.”
To prepare for the impact mobile computing will have on the enterprise in 2015, IT departments need to—among other things—master application programming interface (API) management issues and resolve security issues, Hurwitz notes.
No Matter What, Be Firmly Resolved
In 2015, the changes that IT professionals are being asked to make are no longer simply about being better at their jobs; they're about making the business more competitive. The survival of the business, now more than ever, depends on IT's ability to execute.
