A common theme in many IT departments or functions is the "Them and Us" relationship with the rest of "The Business". Miles of column print are given in IT publications and by analysts on emotional hand wringing about the lack of connection with colleagues in the business and multiple surveys examine the CIO's role and status in the business as well as his or her relationship with the CEO.
Recently, however, the press has been distracted by the idea of automation and everyone being replaced by AI based automation and the supposed death of many jobs, without actually bothering to analyse the capability of AI tools. the fact is that they are both powerful and limited at the same time and it takes an aweful lot of training to get some quite basic capability out of a machine learning application. Anyone who has used Alexa (Amazon's voice based AI agent for automating your home, answering general knowledge questions and playing music) knows that you can be both delighted and frustrated by her abilities to do what you want or to get it so completely wrong that you wring your hands in despair.
In reality the things having the most impact in the UK are Brexit (because it is used as a general excuse for not making decisions and refusing to hire new staff) and the impact of XaaS and Lean. These are gradually evolving the way in which products are developed and IT works both within itself and with other people in the wider business. It's no longer appropriate to organise IT around functional siloes and gatekeeper roles, which slow down progress and frustrate our business colleagues. The move to end-to-end product teams and more integrative roles means that IT needs to shift its mentality from reclusive castle dwellers to engaged collaborators, as IT becomes a fundamental part of business operations. The rest of the business has to do this too. Because, when you look at it, most other functions suffer similar problems of angst and feelings of under appreciation.
The most difficult part of the evolving role, is how does IT relate to Business Operations once this transition has been made and IT is properly organised to align and integrate with Operations. This means that many traditional assumptions around how to implement ITIL, organise testing or approach enterprise architecture (for example) need to be revisited. People in IT need to move towards taking more interest in the business and its customers, as well as what a collaborative culture looks like. It also means that CIOs need to become more assertive (not aggressive) in engaging with their peers to understand and agree business priorities, as well as partnering internally and externally to move quicker to address urgent needs. Old ideas like "boiling the ocean" with monolithic technology change initiatives need to go. Smaller, quicker steps and daring to experiment is now the order of the day. Whilst, rigorously pursuing simplification, security hardening and IT automation in localised areas as these steps are taken is the path to earlier value delivery. This means that 2 speed IT is a misnomer, its more like 6 gear 4 wheel drive IT, which adapts to different terrain and problems.
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