The days of the all-powerful IT department are long behind us. We now know that employees are more tech-savvy today than they have been at any other time in the past, a trend that is only set to grow as more and more ‘Generation Y’ workers make their way into employment.

What this means in practice is that employees often feel completely within their rights to side-step the IT department and bring into play their own devices and preferred software. The rise of this ‘bring-your-own’ culture of IT is well documented and it is becoming clear that more and more organisations are beginning to realise that this is not a trend that should be fought against.

While the consumerisation of IT is now a well-understood concept (Gartner recently predicted that it would be the single most influential technology trend of the decade), the concept of ‘shadow IT’ is less well known. This is where workers look to solve any challenges they face, without turning to the pros on the IT team.

In practical terms this could mean downloading new software tools or signing up to a cloud service to help with a specific task. Looking at this from a ‘glass half full’ perspective, shadow IT has the potential to see implementation times reduced and costs cut, but there is also a danger of losing control of the overall IT strategy and having integration issues later down the line.

Underpinning all this is the need to ensure that an organisation’s IT infrastructure balances with its business objectives. This is something of a utopia for the modern business – aligning IT with corporate strategy in a way that helps the business to bring new and improved products and services to market quicker.

The IT department needs to take a new approach to ensure that they maintain control, while addressing the needs of the business. It’s crucial to reduce complexity and ensure governance is enabling the business to make IT decisions without the potential for catastrophic effects.

There are a few simple steps that can help IT professionals to embrace business IT and realise a strategy that is aligned with both the business and business users’ needs.

  1. Empower employees – Bring your staff into the IT-decision-making process. This will allow them to work in the ways they want while ensuring that a cohesive IT strategy is maintained
  2. Be flexible and decisive – Business priorities will change, so you need to ensure your IT can flex with this. Don’t be afraid to end unsuccessful projects and reinvest the time and money into ones that show early promise
  3. Expand your boundaries – Innovations such as cloud, mobility and remote working are all impacting on how we manage IT. Social media platforms have led to a range of communications taking place outside the protection of the corporate firewall. Don’t be afraid to embrace these tools and turn them into an advantage. Social and collaborative methods should be investigated and real-time data
  4. Connect your IT – IT managers understand the wide range of systems that support various elements of the business. By connecting these, new opportunities can be identified. Helping to simplify and streamline a complex ordering system or an insurance claim, for example, will ultimately save time and costs for the business.
  5. Collaborate – Successful IT professionals arrange regular meetings with the relevant business teams and share as much as possible regarding key challenges and updates on IT deployments. Having the CIO report into the CEO helps to ensure strategic alignment, and that IT is seen as a ‘trusted advisor’ to the business.
  6. Ask vendors to pitch to the business – Vendors need to be able to communicate the business benefits of their solutions. Ensure that they are interviewed by non-IT stakeholders within the business so that they can put this across in non-technical terms.
  7. Cloud – Use the power of cloud computing to design new services and test out innovation at a low risk to the business. IT professionals should embrace the cloud as a catalyst for change and use it to their advantage to show that IT is not just a cost centre but that IT teams can innovate and help achieve business objectives.
  8. Tailor services – Personalise the devices and services used by employees. Not only will this provide a more useful set of tools for the employee, but it will help streamline processes and keep confidential data secure.
  9. Focus on the interface – Employees will only engage with a service if the user-interface is designed correctly. Work with vendors on project design early on to ensure interfaces are easy to use and match how people work.
  10. Highlight success – Take every opportunity to show how IT investments are impacting on the bottom line. Before embarking on a new deployment, benchmark the challenge that the new solution will solve, and circle back in 12 months to calculate the improvements and prove the business case for IT.

Such an approach will lead to a much more successful and flexible IT infrastructure, one that can be shown to deliver real business benefit.

Aegon Religare, an Indian insurance company, provides a good example of how this can work in practice. Following a merger, the director of IT and change management was asked to launch operations across 14 systems and 25 locations – vital if the business was to ensure productivity, guarantee superior customer service and get their products to market quickly.

By building an agency portal to provide a single window for the delivery of business services to all agents, users could find what they needed more easily and the number of calls to the call centre was reduced by 20%. This IT project has had such a significant impact on the way the organisation works that the director of IT and change management has since been promoted to chief operating officer, a traditional ‘business’ role.

As this example shows, when IT departments change the ways they work and create a flexible infrastructure that reflects how employees want to work, the overall business objectives of the company are often simultaneously addressed. In today’s environment we would stress the importance of any business seeing IT as a true value-add service, rather than just as a set of tools.

 

Richard Helliar, UK managing director, Cordys.