The Digital Enterprise

Opening session here at Gartner CIO Forum was about the Digital Enterprise. Again, just some notes I took, it was a long session, but very entertaining, with quite a bit of audience participation.

World has changed outside of IT. More dynamic, more change.
Mobile, social, big data and cloud combine to create a different environment to operate in,

Poll of audience using texts for mobiles - How much of technology's potential has your organisation realised?
55% said between 20% and 40%. Average in most surveys is 43%. Top reason this number is so low, is "the enterprise is not ready to adopt new technologies". But they are going out and doing it themselves, writing apps, going to cloud etc. It's an IT mindset. Not ready to adopt our technologies.

CIOs cannot expect to raise this level by working within IT. Need to take a new look at strategy, funding and skills.
Not about controlling costs anymore, but about supporting growth and innovation.

Top technologies we should be looking at are:
Analytics and business analytics
Mobile technologies
Cloud computing, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS
Collaboration technologies including social media and workflow

We need to keep doing the things including virtualisation, ERP, SOA etc, but the reasons to get increased funding are in top four. CFOs need good business reasons for investing in technology, not technological ones.

CIOs reporting that they don't have the right skills in their organisations. Skill set in most depts based on a world which no longer exists.

Need to hunt for innovative projects, some will fail, but we will still learn from them. Recognise business impact of deploying new technologies, and drive them through. If they don't work, learn from it.

Another text poll. What do most of us do?
Tend to operations
Hunt for innovation
Harvest for results.

Most of us tending to operations, with a bit of innovation. Very little harvesting for results (ie supporting growth)

Most CIOs have senior position in company, ie report to CEO or COO. Also, many CIOs now have wider role than IT. So, we should be leading, not tending.

Best business reason for investing in IT? Improving the customer experience.

Need a digital strategy, not a mobile or social strategy. Bring together mobile, social, cloud, analytics into one strategy.

What we mustn't do is fail to communicate the rationale and options for the things we will not be dong this year. " IT says no". Explain what we're doing and why it's more important than other projects.

Business performance improvement should be endgame for IT, not enablement. That means don't implement a system or finish a project and move to something else. Have to make sure organisation gets most out of it.

New digital technologies have to tap into the work we've been doing for last 30 years in building the infrastructure. Creates huge potential for innovation.



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