The One Constant Will Be Disruption
A call for Resiliency
Harvard Business Review Analytic Services recently released a whitepaper outlining how and why CIOs are prioritizing adaptability in their digital transformation efforts.
I read it so you don’t have to!
Here are some of the key takeaways (along with personal thoughts) I found most interesting.
Resilience is the ability to withstand adversity and bounce back from difficult events. And this can make
or break businesses’ digital transformation efforts. Resilient people are better able to adapt to change and uncertainty. They can think strategically, make quick decisions, and take calculated risks. Resilient processes can help teams withstand and recover from disruptions and failures. Resilient technologies are robust, scalable, and secure, enabling organizations to become more agile and flexible to respond to changing markets and customer expectations.
From the definition alone we can see how important resiliency is regarding digital transformation. The question then becomes, what are the fundamental pillars of resiliency?
Digital transformation success goes beyond enabling the organization to do its work better.
Leaders in the information age are leading from the front. By empathetically and strategically empowering those around them to challenge the norm and providing the digital acumen and safety for teams to thrive in a culture of continuous improvement, experimentation, and rapid innovation. They are using the broader digital ecosystems and application programming interfaces to generate new revenue streams for a sustainable future.
To create a more customer focused organization, people and processes will have to undergo change which can sometimes be difficult to manage. Therefore adaptability and flexibility are key characteristics of the culture that needs to be developed in order to have a more nimble and engaged team. Chief information officers (CIOs) are challenged as never before to help their organizations build agility and resilience.
“At the end of the day, digital transformation is less a technology challenge and more a leadership one,” says Joe Peppard, professor at Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, University College Dublin, and a former principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “When I work with leadership teams, I always emphasize that they perhaps need to see investments in digital less about investments in technology and more about investments in change.”
To become more adaptable and flexible as an organization, individuals will have to become adaptable themselves. Defining clear objectives and making those involved aware of how their contribution helps the project or organization will certainly help.
Today, organizational agility is seen as a prerequisite, positively promoting the mindset of continuous improvement. Leaders are becoming familiar with adopting Agile methodologies and mindsets to functions beyond the software development world. Concepts including squads, scrums, sprint reviews, daily stand-ups, user stories, and retrospectives are increasingly finding their way across the entire organization.
Adopting, teaching, and incorporating these methodologies can lead to well-rounded teams set to facilitate significant change. This enables faster speed to market; increased responsiveness to client demands; and the ability to pivot quickly, experiment and fail fast, attract and retain IT talent, and work more collaboratively and efficiently.
Four technical steps CIOs can implement to bolster resilience:
Reduce technical debt to lower strain on resources
Modularize applications to cut development time and resource requirements
Adopt nimbler microservices architecture to speed change
Increase redundancy across systems
For example, prioritizing long-term rather than short-term value, avoiding development rework and, maximizing value spent on necessary new features and enhancements as the business evolves are some ways to reduce technical debt.
Some organizations are performing “chaos engineering” with their systems, intentionally breaking them to find single points of failure in order to gain insight into their strengths and vulnerabilities.
“In the next five years, CIOs will be instrumental in helping their enterprise navigate the winds of change by enabling ecosystems, co-creating new business models and outcomes, empowering employees, and building resiliency.”
Public cloud is a mainstay of digital transformation because it provides a more affordable, scalable, secure, well-maintained infrastructure than many organizations can manage internally, while microservices facilitate modernization of applications to be more nimble, more flexible, and more reusable so organizations can move quickly while ensuring security. As hybrid-cloud architecture, blockchain, decentralized oracle networks, edge and quantum computing all become more mature, leaders will have to be adaptable and resilient themselves to facilitate new business models and new ways of working as
The One Constant Will Be Disruption.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to read more you can checkout the source here