Tuesday, July 28, 2020

So sánh mức phí hoa hồng App Store với các nền tảng kỹ thuật số khác

Trước khi CEO Tim Cook tham gia vào phiên điều trần chống độc quyền của App Store trước Uỷ ban Tư pháp Hạ viện vào tuần tới, Apple đã uỷ thác cho công ty nghiên cứu Analysis Group thực hiện một nghiên cứu để chứng minh mức phí từ App Store và các quy tắc hoạt động của Apple hoàn toàn tương đồng với các chợ kĩ thuật số khác như Amazon Appstore và Google Play Store. Bài nghiên cứu đầy đủ anh em có thể xem tại ĐÂY.

Apple hiện tại đang lấy 30% doanh thu của tất cả các app có phí và các giao dịch trong app. Cùng với 30% phí của tất cả các giao dịch đăng ký thuê bao kĩ thuật số trong năm đầu tiên và giảm xuống 15% trong năm thứ 2. Nghiên cứu từ Analysis Group đã so sánh mức phí hoa hồng từ Apple so với 38 chợ ứng dụng, phần mềm và các nền tảng chơi game kĩ thuật số khác. Và kết quả cần lưu ý là các cửa hàng này cũng thu 30% doanh thu trên mỗi giao dịch tương tự App Store. Google Play Store, Amazon Appstore, Galaxy Store, Xbox, PlayStation và Nintendo đều thu tương tự như nhau.

So sánh tỷ lệ hoa hồng giữa các chợ ứng dụng.

Tỷ lệ hoa hồng của các chợ game kĩ thuật số.

Xét về mảng “hàng hoá kĩ thuật số” (Digital goods) như sách và nhạc, nghiên cứu cũng chỉ ra rằng mức phí hoa hồng từ các nền tảng nội dung kĩ thuật số khác như Kindle Direct Publishing, Nook và Kobo… đều thu từ 30 đến 65% từ doanh thu bán sách trên nền tảng của chúng.

Xét đến các chợ thương mại điện tử như Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Uber, Walmart, Ticketmaster, TaskRabbit và một vài nền tảng khác nữa, mức phí dao động từ 5% đến 37%.

Nghiên cứu này cho rằng các nhà phát triển App Store kiếm được “phần lớn hơn đáng kể” trong tổng doanh thu trên App Store so với các kênh truyền thống khác. Đối với game, các nhà phát triển và nhà phát hành thu được ít nhất 45% của giá bán lẻ và trước thời kỳ các chợ kĩ thuật số bùng nổ như hiện tại, 60 đến 70% doanh thu phần mềm đi vào túi của các bên trung gian thay vì người sáng tạo.

Đối với quy tắc bắt buộc các nhà phát triển phải sử dụng các tuỳ chọn mua trong ứng dụng của Apple, nghiên cứu từ Analysis Group cho rằng điều đó hoàn toàn phổ biến đối với các website và dịch vụ thương mại điện tử khác. Amazon, eBat, Etsy và Walmart đều có các quy tắc ngăn người bán hướng người mua đến các trang web bên ngoài. Tương tự với Airbnb, VRBO, TaskRabbit, Upwork và SoundBetter của Spotify.

Cuối cùng nghiên cứu kết luận rằng tỷ lệ hoa hồng của App Store phù hợp với các mức phí được tính bởi các chợ nội dung kĩ thuật số khác. Việc phân phối phần mềm theo phương thức kĩ thuật số rẻ hơn so với các cửa hàng truyền thống và quy tắc “kẻ hưởng thụ miễn phí” (chỉ những người thụ hưởng các lợi ích từ hàng hóa công cộng mà không chịu tham gia gánh những chi phí cần thiết để các hàng hóa đó được cung cấp, hoặc chịu gánh những chi phí nhưng ít hơn so với lợi ích mà họ được hưởng) của Apple cũng tương tự với quy tắc của các công ty khác.

CEO Tim Cook có khả năng sẽ trích dẫn nghiên cứu này khi ông làm chứng trước Ủy ban Tư pháp Hạ viện vào thứ Hai. Cook dự kiến sẽ bị thẩm vấn về các khoản phí và chính sách của App Store về việc từ chối ứng dụng và chống cạnh tranh. Lời khai của Cook sẽ là một phần của cuộc điều tra chống độc quyền mà kết quả tuy sẽ không trực tiếp dẫn đến việc thực thi các hành động trừng phạt nhưng sẽ chi phối các luật lệ trong tương lai mà có thể kiểm soát và điều chỉnh các chợ kỹ thuật số.

Theo: Macrumors

Sunday, July 12, 2020

CIO - Digital KPIs: Your keys to measuring digital transformation success

Digital KPIs: Your keys to measuring digital transformation success

CIOs use digital KPIs to gauge the impact of digital business initiatives. The KPIs also recalibrate digital models based on value and performance.

By Clint Boulton

Senior Writer, CIO | 22 APRIL 2020 18:00 SGT

Digital KPIs: Your keys to measuring digital transformation success — Thinkstock

Ask a CIO how he or she quantifies the impact of their digital transformations and you may get a quizzical look. Most CIOs don't have metrics for gauging the success of digital projects, such as new mobile apps or chatbots.

But CIOs who fail to quantify these initiatives may find themselves outflanked by nimbler rivals, analysts say. Digital key performance indicators (KPIs) are one way to track transformation progress. But to avoid wasting time and resources, CIOs need to make sure they know what they’re tracking and what they aim to accomplish.

“The biggest limitation [of digital KPIs] is the lack of a clearly defined digital ambition," or strategy, Gartner analyst Paul Proctor tells CIO.com. "Having a clear idea of your digital ambition will give you some ideas of what you should be measuring to measure your progress. You can't measure something you don’t have a measuring stick for."

What are digital KPIs?

Digital KPIs are metrics for evaluating the performance of digital business initiatives. Digital KPIs can help an organization ascertain how far it has progressed on its digital strategy and how well it is improving its digital business outcomes.

Companies have traditionally measured business performance based on net profit, earnings per share and other Wall Street metrics, which are supported by KPIs such as inventory turns, production quotas and customer satisfaction.

Digital KPIs are more difficult to define, as businesses from various industries have different ways to quantify their digital initiatives. Moreover, attaching the word “digital” can make the meaning of such KPIs murky, particularly in enterprises that view digital business and business as indistinguishable.

How to define digital KPIs

Gartner’s Proctor says that CIOs should craft digital KPIs by targeting two broad categories. The first set of KPIs should assess the company's progress in digitizing its current business model by measuring goals in sales, marketing, operations, supply chain, products/services and customer service. For instance, many concerns in retail, casual dining and other sectors use chatbots to digitize order taking. CIOs should evaluate such digital operations using metrics that assess adoption rates and business impact relative to traditional operating modes.

A second set of KPIs should assess growth, revenue, market share and margin metrics for digital platforms. Caterpillar acquired Yard Club to rent heavy machines through an online marketplace. Cleveland Clinic sells algorithms for analyzing cardiology and oncology through Apervita's online marketplace. Such digital revenue streams should be evaluated separate from analog streams to assess their impact on the bottom line.

Digital KPI adopters

Senior business leaders will gripe that estimations of digital maturity are more based on anecdotes than hard data, according to ServiceNow CIO Chris Bedi. To quantify his company’s progress for automating repetitive tasks, Bedi created a system that calculates how the company is progressing along its digitization journey. Though Bedi doesn’t describe it as such, it’s a measurement model for digital KPIs, per Gartner.

The model starts with a questionnaire, which HR, IT, sales and other business groups apply to each process, such as automating accruals, transferring employees from one department to another, or provisioning laptops. Responses are color-coded and rendered in a visual heat map that details the digitization metric for every process, with variables such as the inclusion of real-time analytics and machine learning algorithms influencing the score. A low score nets a level 1 rating, described as “clunky, slow and frustrating,” while a level 4 rating indicates that the company is using platforms to automate and execute work.

Companies needn’t fear being stuck on level 1; the scorecards trigger recommendations that business lines can follow to boost their score. ServiceNow customers such as Humana are using the scorecards.

"The framework isn’t perfect, but having one is better than not having one," Bedi says. Moreover, organizations can "adopt it, tweak it and make it their own.”

Building on the momentum of the scorecards, Bedi is building a diagnostic model that helps organizations estimate digital KPIs such as operational metrics, speed and cycle time, as well as Net Promoter Scores based on customer and employee feedback. This diagnostic model will help quantify “true business value,” Bedi says.

To learn how its customers are interacting digitally with its brand, TGI Fridays tracks daily active users of its website and mobile software and follows posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, says Chief Experience Officer Sherif Mityas.

Fridays also closely analyzes interactions consumers have with its chatbots, including number of conversations and conversation length, which gives Mityas a better understanding of how natural language processing is working for consumers trying to “talk” to the platform. Page views, click-throughs and how often a consumer has completed or abandoned his or her checkout round out Fridays’ KPIs. “It’s not always perfect, but when you try stuff and it doesn’t work you learn,” Mityas says.

At industrial manufacturer Schneider Electric, CIO Elizabeth Hackenson uses digital KPIs to track anything from the company’s cybersecurity posture to the number of staff she identifies as “digital citizens,” those who casually consume technology, to “digital disruptors,” those who conceive of and champion changes in business processes.

Schneider also tracks how many of its products are digitally connected through internet of things (IoT) sensors and internet connections, Hackenson says.

Digital KPI best practices

ServiceNow, TGI Fridays and Schneider Electric may be digital outliers; only half of CEOs Gartner has surveyed have KPIs to measure digital success, says Proctor, who recommends several steps CIOs can take to measure the value of their digital business:

Work with senior executives to quantify the extent to which their areas would benefit from digitalization. A CIO might work with a COO to define how much of the company’s manufacturing operations should be digitalized and what benefits to expect.
Set KPIs and goals that lay out the digital business journey and sharpen expected business outcomes. For example, Proctor recommends that healthcare CIOs shift from talking about connected healthcare as a vision to proposing the potential percentage of patient "visits" that will employ telemedicine, and then describe the expected benefits of achieving this goal.
Measure the progress of your digital journey and the business value it creates. Here, some KPIs will be "transitional," while others will become permanent metrics for business performance as transformation is achieved and digital business becomes standard operating procedure. For example, an enterprise that builds a digital ecosystem may permanently add ecosystem metrics to its ongoing business performance KPIs. Good metrics should influence C-suite decisions such as budget allocations, business process improvements and culture changes.
Use KPIs to support specific outcome expectations, such as, "by reaching our 2020 goal of digitizing ABC, we will benefit from an X increase in these business and financial metrics."
KPIs should influence business decision-making. KPIs should inform course corrections. For example, as a business approaches 50 percent of customer calls through an automated system, customer Net Promoter Score may materially fall, indicating a need to invest more in the system or change technologies. Good KPIs will inform the need to change before material loss occurs.

The benefits of digital KPIs

There are no magical formulas for digital business success, but KPIs can help.

“The digital KPI is all about understanding where you’re making money or improving an existing business model, how to measure that and work with your non-IT execs to achieve new business outcomes that you've set based on the fact that you're going digital,” Proctor says. "Outside of that all that you have is a collection of new projects that are using technology to do new stuff and unfortunately that's where most businesses are today."

The stakes are high for CIOs and their C-suite peers to cement a digital strategy — and even higher to establish KPIs to measure its effectiveness. Disruption occurs in a market once digital revenue hits 20 percent of the total. “If you’re not [reasonably] digital at that point, you’re toast,” Proctor says.

CIO - Design thinking: The secret to digital success

Design thinking: The secret to digital success

Design thinking is becoming a key pillar in digital transformations, with more enterprises tapping the design philosophy to deliver user-friendly products and services.

By Clint Boulton

Senior Writer, CIO | 18 APRIL 2019 18:00 SGT

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is emerging as a major ingredient for digital transformation success. But what exactly is design thinking, and how are leading CIOs harnessing its power to enhance business value?

Design thinking practitioners observe and analyze user behaviors to gain insights into their needs and wants, according to Gartner. Ideally, they can use this information to create digital products and services that help them acquire and retain customers.

This innovation philosophy is gaining sway among businesses, with CIOs leveraging design thinking as a key part of their IT and product development strategies.

Design thinking vs. human-centered design

Design thinking is closely related to human-centered design — so much so that the terms are often used interchangeably. Experts differ both on the degree of difference between both philosophies, as well as whether there is a difference in practice.

Some experts, such as Gartner analyst Marcus Blosch, say human-centered design is an umbrella term under which design thinking sits. If human-centered design is the philosophy that puts people at the center of digital solutions and services that are being designed, design thinking includes the best practices used to build those solutions.

“It’s about finding out peoples’ behavior, motivations and needs and coming up with solutions and services to match,” Blosch tells CIO.com. Human-centered design includes practices such as social network analysis or narrative analysis. “The toolbox is wide and varied,” Blosch says.

On that score, Shelley Evenson, managing director of Accenture’s Fjord design consultancy, agrees. Evenson says that human-centered design falls under design thinking. “But they are really the same thing,” she says. Both leverage aspects of anthropology, sociology and psychology to meet consumer desires.

The design thinking approach

Design thinking represents a departure from the more traditional approach in which design is driven top-down. In this scenario, management facilitates the creation of digital products, brings them to market and explains how they solve problems, says John Morley, a business design strategist at Hitachi Vantara, who worked on design thinking in prior roles at AppDynamics, Symantec and EMC.

Design thinking, on the other hand, is a bottom-up approach, with employees throughout all layers of an organization influencing and refining product development. Morley says it’s common for junior-level employees to ferry feedback to those in power as they tend to be closer to customers. An outcome-based mindset is essential.

“An organization has to commit to opening up and having a feedback loop around ideation,” Morley says. “People have to not be focused on their role in the org chart but how their skills can support a desired outcome.”

There’s a trick to effective design thinking: If it doesn’t become embedded throughout the organization’s culture, it will fail, Morley says. “The perspective of the organization should be customer-centric,” he adds.

Design thinking principles

Perhaps you’ve heard the expression “starting with the customer and working backwards.” This is the ethos from which design thinking springs. And while it may seem like common sense, enterprises have long taken the build-it-and-they-will-come tack.

Prior to design thinking, user-friendliness was an afterthought. IT departments would take specifications and then spend months building technology solutions. But in the consumerization era, in which employees and consumers use their preferred devices and applications, user-friendliness is a requirement not a perk, putting increased pressure on IT to design its solutions with users in mind, says Evenson.

Evenson, who also worked in design roles at Facebook and Microsoft before joining Fjord, says design thinking represents a cultural shift in peoples’ “liquid expectations,” which emphasizes the fluidity of expectations around technical solutions. Consider the revolution Apple ignited with its iPhone and subsequent App Store launch a decade ago, which drove people to expect great mobile applications from their favorite brands. Since then, many quick-service chains have added ordering and payment capabilities to their mobile apps. Such moves have been propelled by liquid expectations.

But as technology is increasingly woven into the matrix of a business, even traditional companies are considering user experience as a key factor in solutions both for employees and customers. A big part of Evenson’s job involves speaking with CIOs and other business leaders about how to build software and services akin to Amazon.com, Airbnb and other services that consumers feel were designed for them personally. “You can’t have a corporate service that isn’t considering usability, desirability and putting people first rather than what we can do technically or what makes sense to get what they need,” Evenson says.

The shift to design thinking typically involves ditching the classic cubicle farm for open, collaborative workspaces where product managers, designers and software engineers sit and huddle over new solutions. In such environments, it’s not uncommon for CIOs to walk into the workspace and not know exactly who reports to them.

Design thinking best practices

Design thinking requires a culture change. But for many firms undertaking digital initiatives to transform their businesses, design thinking is increasingly becoming part of corporate strategic agendas, says Chris Pacione, co-founder and CEO of LUMA Institute, which teaches people how to do human-centered design. Design thinking, Pacione says, can help foster innovation as companies seek to “renew” themselves frequently to keep up with the pace of change.

Pacione’s approach to design thinking blends product design and systems engineering with anthropology and ethnographic approaches. Design thinking, Pacione says, can help organizations avoid common pitfalls that keep projects from succeeding. Those include:

Problem framing: Well-intentioned teams often rush to fix a problem without fixing its root cause. They don’t capture the scope of the issue plaguing their organization. Pacione recommends firms “question the question” by exploring new ways of framing the problem accurately and ensuring teams are on the same page. “Teams that understand the real opportunity in the first place have a chance of success,” he says.
Empathy: Another big reason projects fail is the lack of understanding and empathy for stakeholders the initiatives intend to serve. Capturing empathy isn’t easy, as end users don’t share a hive mind. Moreover, enterprises must design solutions with a mind for those who install, repair or maintain them. This is where contextual inquiry and other ethnographic and participatory design techniques come in handy.
Iteration:Corporate governance, which is linear-minded, tends to crimp innovation, which requires iterative approaches. Organizations must allow for the multiple failures associated with great or novel ideas, Pacone says. This requires sketching, storyboarding and prototyping solutions based on stakeholder feedback. “Really innovative solutions that have impact are the result of numerous innovation and a continuous flow of assumption testing and improvement. The faster time to market maxim is irrelevant in this day and age. Organizations that iterate the fastest and do it well will win.”
Project failure points: Identify areas that aren’t working and fix them. That’s one of the advantages of iteration; designers and engineers can fix bugs and user design quirks on a rolling basis, from inception of minimally viable products to fully-baked commercial solutions.
Collaboration: Organizations living under threat of disruption have to come up with good ideas and collaborate with other departments and with clients to get them implemented. They must also help to impart ways of working that are more visually imaginative and creative.

Pacione says the impetus for driving design-thinking into an organization tends to come from organizations looking to improve customer experiences. “The impetus is on the outside because it’s affecting bottom and top-lines sooner,” Pacione says.

But CIOs may also be pressured to adopt design thinking to ensure they can recruit the talent they desire. Millennial employees, which already comprise more than half the workforce, will pass on employers they view as having technologies and practices from the digital Dark Ages, Evenson says.

One way corporations can avoid the “digital Dark Ages” is to create a “design culture” that involves hiring more designers and prototyping new solutions. “They see the pressure of the liquid expectations both in delivering their services and in keeping their organization growing and thriving,” Evenson says.

Design thinking pitfalls

Technology is rarely the stumbling block for adopting design thinking. Rather, organizations trip over their own feet by being too hung on practices that require rigorous documentation and testing, which can make it very difficult to build anything iterative, says Evenson.

“Most people like the certainty of requirements,” which they falsely believe gives them an idea of what the outcome will be, Evenson says.

While requirements provide the illusion of safety, most organizations lack the muscle memory or the skills and competencies required to adopt and adapt to more iterative development. “What’s lacking in most organizations is imagination and creativity — the ability to do things differently,” Evenson says. “It can make it challenging to create.”

Another hurdle lurks on the horizon in the form of designing so-called “ethical AI,” or creating artificial intelligence agents that are largely free from bias to prevent them from augmenting outcomes and experiences indiscriminately. For example, New York City is struggling to weed out bias along race, gender and class lines as it applies AI to solve crime, among other social issues.

“We need to take empathy a step further and understand the combination of people and systems,” Evenson says. “It’s important to think about ethics and responsibility in design.”

CIO - 7 ways to position IT for success in 2020

7 ways to position IT for success in 2020

Look out, here comes tomorrow. Is your IT organization prepared to face the new year's opportunities and challenges?

By John Edwards

CIO | 9 DECEMBER 2019 19:00 SGT

7 ways to position IT for success in 2020 — Thinkstock

Forget about New Year's resolutions, which tend to be tossed aside and forgotten as soon as the champagne loses it sparkle. For IT leaders, the new year is a prime time for planning, organizing and launching new strategies and initiatives. Evolving business trends, security issues and increasing government oversight of many IT activities, combined with a seemingly never-ending series of disruptive technologies, make it essential to begin thinking about tactics and goals as soon as possible for a successful 2020.

Here are 7 tips to help you hit the new year running.

1. Collaborate with business leaders to assess IT services and goals

Work to ensure that IT is a business partner, not an order-taker, says Michael Cantor, CIO of data center support provider Park Place Technologies. He suggests scheduling meetings with key enterprise leaders to review IT's business value based on projects completed in 2019 and how IT can support the new year's business goals. "Roll all the feedback into a strategy and rough IT plan for 2020," Cantor advises. "Participate in the budgeting cycle and help ensure that funds are in the right places for the strategy — don’t leave it up to the business partners to do this on their own."

Cantor believes that such an approach will position the CIO as the enterprise thought leader while providing a convenient launch platform for IT's 2020 business mission. "[The plan] also enables transparency into the business of IT, providing a basic framework for measuring high-level results in 2020 and allowing ongoing measurements against those results," he says.

2. Aim to control disruption

Business and technology disruption trends will continue to evolve in the new year and beyond. "IT has an increased responsibility and opportunity to help organizations stay 'future ready'," says Roy Nicholson, business consulting principal at accounting and business advisory firm Grant Thornton. Nicholson suggests creating a transformation management office to identify promising new transformative technologies and methods, and to administer enterprisewide transformation initiatives. "In the back office or front office," he notes.

IT departments should be proactive about issues before they happen by creating a six- to twelve-month roadmap, suggests Rahul Mahna, managing director of process, risk and technology solutions at top 20 accounting firm EisnerAmper. "A simple way to create a plan is to look at future ideas using a weighting system to determine which initiatives to prioritize," he explains. "If you're busy fighting fires day-to-day, and you're not planning ahead, your organization is always going to be at a higher risk."

3. Centralize data analytics

IT departments have long been responsible for data collection, storage and management. Data analysis, meanwhile, is usually handled within individual business units. Yet as more enterprises begin understanding data analytics' strategic importance, and as analytics are increasingly performed on a much larger scale and in real time, there's an emerging trend toward moving to a more centralized data analytics approach.

"Successful analytics requires IT engineers and data scientists to work closely with each other and with business units to develop solutions and generate useful insights," advises Yan Huang, an assistant professor of business technologies at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. "The IT department, or sometimes the IT department and a separate analytics department, will be driving organizations' analytics capability."

4. Stay on top of security

The start of a new year is a good time to evaluate enterprise security and IT's role in protecting systems and data. "Take time to move from firefighting mode, and work with your team to think about the big picture — about 18 months out — and attack foundational security tasks," advises Jessica Ireland, security, risk and compliance practice lead for technology advisory firm Info-Tech Research Group. "Our research shows that evergreen security topics are still relevant today, because IT teams are unable to take the time to get those basics in place."

Ireland recommends creating space for security experts within the IT team, particularly if a dedicated security team isn't available. "In the past three-to-six years we've seen more organizations catch onto the importance of security, not only from a common sense, must-protect-data perspective, but also as a business strategy," she says.

Security breaches have become commonplace, and customers and business partners want to know their data is fully protected. Ireland notes that with GDPR and other privacy standards, such as consumer-specific mandates like CCPA (which takes effect in January 2020), individuals and businesses are recognizing that they have the right to be protected from data theft. "Security must become table stakes for your business ... or you risk looking out-of-date and will lose opportunities," she warns.

Given the seriousness of the threat, security risk management should be integral to all business and IT decisions in 2020. "Understanding your risk tolerance levels, and how that informs your team's strategy ... will help your organization in the long run in terms of investments and assurance to your clients," Ireland says.

5. Reach out to external customers

As 2020 dawns, IT leaders should devote time to addressing the needs of their enterprise's external customers, challenging their teams to assess how well they're supporting business leaders on meeting product and/or service priorities.

"There can be a disconnect here, and that provides an incredible opportunity to align and integrate the IT department as an important partner in driving key initiatives and directly contributing to the bottom line and company success," advises Richard Pierle, managing partner and CEO of technology consulting firm Pier Digital Advisory Services.

"Building empowered, cross-functional teams focused on delivering value to customers is the most effective way to improve the organization’s ability to deliver value to customers," explains Kurt Bittner, vice president of enterprise solutions for Scrum.org, a software development training and certification organization. "To create these teams, you must obliterate the barrier between business and IT. Look for ways to create digital products or services that help improve customer experiences."

6. Double-down on metrics

With technology and business activities drawing ever closer, IT leaders in 2020 will feel increasing pressure to implement, study and learn from key performance metrics. "[Since] most IT leaders are focused on metrics as related specifically to technology, statistics on business success often fall to the wayside," explains Wendy Pfieffer, CIO at cloud computing software company Nutanix. "CIOs can optimize efficiency through balancing both of these KPIs."

To promote enhanced business productivity, Pfieffer’s IT teams prioritizes two critical KPIs. "First, we focus on First Time Right (FTR), which helps us optimize our service deliveries and promote technological efficiency," she explains. "Second, we utilize Net Promoter Score (NPS) for insight into whether or not we are meeting our customers’ needs."

Studying metrics such as these can help IT leaders focus their attention on the most critical functions and prioritize helping those operations succeed.

7. Prepare your team to cope with change

As they enter the new decade, IT departments need to continue their technology evolution at full steam, observes Hriday Ravindranath, chief information and technology officer for BT Global. “For future success, teams need to create a learning culture that embraces and adapts to a digital-native approach," he states. Getting teams up to speed on next-generation technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, 5G and cloud networks, should be a top priority.

"IT departments will be expected to be experts on these new technologies and provide a new level of service to customers beyond operations and analytics," he notes. "By building a learning culture, IT teams will become accustomed to failing fast, being agile and adapting to customers’ evolving needs."

Brad Clay, senior vice president and chief information and compliance officer for printer and imaging products provider Lexmark, believes that IT needs to begin planning for risk, yet training for uncertainty. As the rate of change increases, the ability to understand and plan for every possible risk grows increasingly difficult. "By training for uncertainty instead, we equip our teams to respond in the best possible way to the challenges we didn't anticipate and support their ability to take bold risks that can best position the organization for success," he says. "When confronted with this type of fast-paced environment, the greatest failure that an organization can make is to stop taking action."

Takeaway

IT organizations need to move away from their service provider roots to become an active participant in creating and enhancing business value. "As we head into 2020, it’s not enough for IT departments to keep the lights on and the organization safe," observes Jarod Greene, general manager of the Technology Business Management Council, a nonprofit professional organization dedicated to advancing technology business management practices. "Success in 2020 starts with understanding what the organizational, personal and functional goals are, and then working backwards to demonstrate how IT departments can become a change-agent."