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Ross Armstrong

Principal Research Director

Business-led digital transformation cannot occur without the full participation of the CIO in the process of identifying business problems or opportunities and creatively ideating solutions that relieve the pain.

While IT may excel at ‘business-as-usual’ IT operations, the CIO must leverage those skills and assets to truly innovate at a level that digital business initiatives demand. In other words, the CIO and their team must adopt a digital-first mindset.

To do this successfully, IT must correctly roadmap the goals, technology assets, and underlying capabilities that are required to enable digital initiatives, as these are critical to the success of strategic technology plans.

1.1 Visualize the “Industry” of the Future

1.2 Assess Digital Innovation Capability & Readiness

2.1 Zero-in on Business Objectives & Innovation Goals

2.2 Build Your Digital Vision and Strategy

2.3 Select and Prioritize Digital Initiatives

3.1 Business-Aligned IT Innovation Roadmap

3.2 Govern & Manage Digital Execution

Discover digital trends within industry

“The Art of the Possible”

Diagnose digital capabilities & readiness. “Build the case for the remaining journey”

Understand business architecture and organizational context

Outline digital vision, define digital objectives and business initiatives

Iterate digital initiatives to prioritize and build business case

Define the innovation goals, as well as core and enabling initiatives for IT

Provide support to IT as needed for a successful delivery

Stakeholders

CIO, IT Management

CIO, IT Management

CIO, Business Executives

CIO, Business Executives

CIO, Business Executives

CIO, IT Management

CIO, IT Management

Advisory Support

• Review CKIP
• Get insight from the CIO on:
• Organization value streams
• Org structure
• Key tech challenges/ opportunities
• Research the industry landscape and tailor Digital Trends report to what is relevant to you
• Present Digital Trends (The of the future) to IT Management.

• Run an Innovation Readiness diagnostic (leverage existing Digital Maturity diagnostic).
• Measure Digital Maturity of business capabilities and IT services using industry reference architecture.
• Leverage existing Info-Tech diagnostics data to provide industry benchmarks.
• Engage IT Management in a discussion on innovation maturity aspirations.

• 1-hr interviews or one session with business executives to elicit business objectives and digital innovation initiatives over planning horizon.
• Understand value prop and positioning.
• Customize reference architecture with Chief Architect
• Map initiatives to value stream stages and capabilities. Color-code by priority.

• Visioning workshop with business executives: Present Digital Trends.
• Ideation session with relevant stakeholders.
• Validate ideas through research.
• Build opportunity map. Prioritize capabilities to transform.
• Identify key stakeholders and define dominant personas
• Map stakeholder journeys, identify digital business initiatives to improve experience, reduce risk/cost.

• Select a digital business initiative and define output (design mockup). Break down initiative into business and tech projects.
• Establish assumptions and evaluate feasibility.
• Develop business case and simulate sensitivity to assumptions.
• Determine initiative benefits and ROI.
• Establish Governance Model for Digital Strategy.

• Determine IT assets and services to enable each digital initiative
• Identify resulting IT projects.
• Map projects to IT capabilities with ITRG M&G Framework
• Identify capacity changes required in IT capabilities
• Identify dependencies, stage gates and timeline for IT projects.
• Define IT goals, KPI, and targets.
• Detail IT innovation roadmap.

• Review IT Innovation journey with CIO, presenting research to support roadmap projects
• Collaboratively revise CKIP to match initiatives resulting from Digital strategy and IT Innovation
• Advisory services as required.
• Executive Advisor review and revision of CKIP as needed.

Deliverable(s)

Presentation: The of the Future

Digital Innovation Capability & Readiness Assessment Report

Business Architecture Level 3 - Heat mapped

Digital Business Strategy

Initiative Business Case,

Digital Transformation Roadmap

IT Innovation Roadmap

Updated CKIP,

Advisory Experiences

You are here

The ability of IT to clearly demonstrate its understanding of the organization’s purpose and leverage technology resources to advance that purpose.

The adoption of digital technologies to innovate and re-invent existing business, talent, and operating models to drive growth, business value and improved customer experience.

A heat-mapping effort to analyze the maturity and priority of each IT capability relative to the strategic projects that they serve.

An institutionalized process for identifying and leveraging technology in novel ways to create business efficiencies, advance business goals, and improve IT-business alignment.

A set of standard objectives that most industry players will feature in their corporate plans.

• Once digital business initiatives have been selected and prioritized, IT must plan for change.
• The CIO must prepare for this change by adopting and instilling a culture of IT innovation.
• This change will also come in the form of new assets and services that must be implemented or optimized in order to enable the prioritized digital business initiatives.

• If certain IT capabilities are not in place, or existing capabilities are sub-par, then digital initiatives risk the chance of failure.
• Like any other project, new or improved IT capabilities must be thoroughly planned and mapped directly to the digital needs of the business.
• Without these linkages and adequate preparation, IT cannot deliver on its key promise of innovation.

• Determine the services and assets required to enable each business digital initiative.
• Identify projects to improve the foundational IT capabilities necessary to support digital enablement via these assets and services.
• Identify any changes in IT resource demand required to implement or improve IT capabilities.
• Create an IT innovation roadmap for resulting projects and associated details.

Stakeholder Journey maps from Phase 2.2 of Info-Tech’s approach for aligning IT with digital business strategy provided the foundational ideas for digital business initiatives.

In Phase 2.2 you also investigated the business appetite for IT innovation, as well as any barriers to it.

By this point you have leveraged industry roundtables to better understand the art of the possible, exploring trends in budgeting, staffing / hiring / retention, alignment with senior leadership, IT capacity and satisfaction, critical performance areas, and creating new options out of disruption.

The proposed digital initiatives from Phase 2.2 were iterated to create a prioritized list. Next, business cases for each digital initiative were created in Phase 2.3 of Info-Tech’s approach for aligning IT with your industry-centric digital business strategy.

The prioritized list, and associated business cases (example at right), should comprise the digital transformation roadmap proposed by IT and the organization’s business leaders.

What follows from here is Phase 3.1, in which the CIO will determine which new or improved assets, services, and underlying IT capabilities are required to ensure that digital business initiatives are both successful and properly supported.

Identify digital business initiatives prioritized by the organization.

Leverage industry roundtables where necessary.

Understand the business case supporting each business initiative to validate the business initiative roadmap.

Leverage IT competencies to improve upon ‘business as usual’.

Identify new and/or transformed digital business capabilities that need to be supported by IT.

Identify new or improved IT capabilities required to support these digital business capabilities.

Brainstorm and prioritize projects for improving or supporting IT capabilities.

Calculate changes to IT resource demand.

Develop project metrics and estimate budget needs.

Create project profiles.

Consolidate projects into initiatives.

Build project timeline.

• List of IT competencies
• Discussion of which competencies will spur innovation
• Value streams and business capabilities

• List of new software, hardware, and other IT assets required to enable or support digital business initiatives

• Info-Tech business capability map for your industry

• CIO
• CDO
• IT leadership team
• Department / business division leaders