By Mike Sommer
In today’s economy, executives must account for market pressure while keeping focused on the evolution of innovation in technology. This new reality presents both challenges and opportunities for businesses and IT to align on IT strategy and finding balance between the desire to seek value and manage for risk. Due to the difficulty in finding this balance, business leaders are increasingly contracting with cloud-based service providers for the creation of applications, integrations and custom development, with or without the support of enterprise IT. These leads are essentially acting as CIOs by providing their own technology-led business solutions, which leads to fragmentation and delays in accomplishing business initiatives.
Enterprise IT Needs to Renew Itself
At many companies, IT is no longer seen as a provider of essential business outcomes. I have witnessed firsthand that business leaders often assume that the IT organization lacks the skill sets for an as-a-service world. The outcome of this impression is that businesses believe that enterprise IT takes longer to implement solutions than if they find alternative solutions to get the job done. But bypassing enterprise IT often puts businesses at risk because users are likely to underestimate the challenges and risks of a service or data integration. These challenges include security, cost overruns and delayed delivery. Enterprise IT has a critical balancing act: to enable services and platforms that improve productivity, while protecting against fragmentation and security threats.
The pace of software innovation is rapidly increasing. Bluewolf’s latest The State of Salesforce Report showed that 64% of companies using Salesforce reported releasing monthly updates at the minimum — a 20% jump from last year. To help save your company from fragmented IT decision making, which if left unchecked is a recipe for disaster, consider these important takeaways:
The 4 Key Areas of Enterprise IT Renewal
*Ensuring the proper strategy for an evolving flexible technology landscape is critical. Companies must have a strategy that is designed to address issues that face companies today, including how quickly requests can be assessed, how decisions are made within the business and how IT aligns to business objectives.
*Cloud technology enables companies to build for scale. Cloud infrastructure and technology gives companies flexibility, which is how you build value in your technology delivery team. Technology, especially cloud applications, must align the overall shareholder and business vision and objectives in order to drive measurable improvements.
*In order to maximize the ROI of new and emerging technology platforms and ecosystems a company must have a clear vision and communicate the purpose of these changes to the entire organization. Doing this properly will shape the future and invent the next wave of cutting-edge business solutions.
*Companies that focus on implementations at a “constant speed” simply cannot keep pace with demand. Whereas companies that understand that it is now necessary to innovate at multiple speeds, and take advantage of business opportunities as they arise in the market, will succeed.
When enterprise architecture and cloud governance architectures are properly implemented and viewed holistically, executives can look beyond cost containment to full business collaboration with IT. Alignment between business and IT will encourage a more holistic path towards innovation and growth by offering a more agile, focused and flexible IT strategy.
Mike Sommer is an enterprise architect and cloud governance lead at Bluewolf, a business consulting firm.
