Have you noticed that the business capabilities least supported by the IT team seem to be the product and corporate strategy? The most supported functions are often finance and business operations. Why is this? Does it make aligning IT Strategy with the corporate strategy more difficult?
Before my career computing often started within the finance teams as just one or two people. The computer of the day was little more than an overgrown calculator with less power than my watch. They automated parts of the accounting processes. Targeting problems which were calculation heavy and highly repetitive.
Computing in business I think grew along these highly automatable processes into operations and point of sales in retail. It was only with the rise of the web that we see the IT services become central to the customer journey and therefore value chain of the organisation.
In 2023 I see the IT team expanding the services it is providing to the organisation and continuing the journey up from the finance and operational processes we started back in the 1960s. This bottom-up journey I think is one reason why the capabilities of strategy for product and corporation are so little supported by IT. Their processes are less repetitive and therefore less easy to design solutions for. Some would say they do not need IT applications beyond the basic email and office suites.
This lack of collaboration between the strategy and IT teams means they can become strangers in the workplace. Strangers that therefore don’t talk about the subtle strategy changes and adaption of the business and IT strategies. I think this can be an issue for the organisation as it can make the IT team slow to respond to changes that were not signposted as coming, resulting in missed opportunities or additional costs to speed up change. In the most extreme cases, it can result in IT being an afterthought and therefore gaps in business cases being present. Driving a demotivating IT culture of reactive endeavours to try to keep the wheels on a changing business.
The data team have often avoided this lack of engagement. Data science and advanced analytics can be central to corporate and product strategy. These capabilities require to measure and model the business both now and in terms of future scenarios. Peering with the data team can therefore be an approach to mitigate these issues for the IT team.
The data and strategy teams will struggle to implement or automate changes based on the data without the IT team’s help. Automation is not easy but is one sweet spot where all three teams gain from working closely together. Another could be to run Proof of Concepts and demonstrate new value, without dropping to manual processing through Excel.
For more on IT Strategy check out my other blog posts and my Udemy course on IT Strategy.
