CIO Summit 2014: Focus on Outcome-based IT

Whenever most businesses hear the word IT transformation, two red flags immediately go up. The first is: How much is it going to cost and how long will it take to reach ROI? The second is: How difficult is it going to be to execute and does the company have the expertise to carry it forward?   Sandra Ng, group VP, IDC’s Asia/Pacific Practice Group, says that as markets change dynamically, businesses are looking at IT projects to deliver hard-core business value. It’s no longer about ROI or TCO but how much impact it made to the top line and bottom-line of an organization.  “The market place of tomorrow is built on borderless connections, mostly online, changing rapidly with more focus and speed and automation and intelligent devices,” she says.To conquer and win in this new marketplace, CIOs need to change the way IT views, runs and measures the success of its initiatives. A look at the e-ICT marketplace today shows the convergence and collision of four specific areas of the ICT industry: Consumer devices, digital and premium content, x-commerce, and entertainment/content applications and services.  “In the last four years, our lives have been more affected by the rate of change of technology compared to the last two decades. Conventional IT is morphing into a more service led-environment, rapidly shifting from IT agility to business agility,” she says.  First, Ng says that CIOs need to forget to worry about budgets. With outcome-based IT, it doesn’t matter who is paying for a project as long as it delivers business results. She also says that there has been a recent surge in the number of joint projects occurring between CIOs and LOBs, where business and IT work in tandem to make a significant business difference.   But to make this outcome-based mind-set a standard practice, CIOs need to change how they think and operate. Ng says that some major shifts include the need to think in terms of business applications and process managers compared to technical developers and administrators. CIOs shouldn’t spend their time thinking about managing giant, in-house IT infrastructure monoliths. With smart vendor and SLA management, they can start investing more time to collaborate with the business. And finally the structural thinking and reactive mind set needs to be replaced with a creative thinking and exploratory mind-set.