Navigating our new reality has been a real game-changer. It has revealed a growing digital divide between businesses that were already down the path of transformation and others struggling to keep pace.
Surviving in the new reality requires businesses to deliver at speeds today’s customers expect. To accomplish this, the way IT operates must be reimagined. It needs to employ an operating model that is agile, dynamic, and adaptive to both business needs and market demands in order to deliver at varying speeds and scale.
This market speed operating model must be portfolio driven – meaning from how people are organised and governed all through to the technology architecture that supports it – and designed around the specific value streams of the business and its unique velocities, attributes, and characteristics.
In a hyper-connected world, IT needs to deliver on the promise of the connected enterprise. The Future of IT is about removing friction and adding new capabilities to enable a front, middle, and back-office that is laser-focused on a profitable, customer-centric, digitally-enabled business.
The 6 key priority areas for IT leaders
- Xaas Champion: An exponential shift from on-premises to IT consumed as a service (XaaS), with IT supporting applications by brokering, integrating, and orchestrating cloud-based as-a-service systems.
- Data-centric: Data as IT’s primary value proposition, providing IT teams with an opportunity to take on more of a data management role, to enable the power and advantages of advanced analytics and emerging AI solutions.
- Resilience-focused: The ever-growing pressure of cyber threats, which demands a growing focus on resilience.
- Talent incubator: The severe shortage of vital IT talent calls for novel, creative solutions to recruit and retain people with the right skills to drive digital transformation.
- Innovation at velocity: The pressure IT faces to do more — faster and better — to support rapid digitalisation and innovation.
- Responsible operations: The rise of ESG: IT needs to step up to support non-financial reporting, embed ESG into systems, reduce its own carbon footprint and improve its performance in terms of diversity and fair working practices
