I just read this very interesting article from MIT Sloan: How Leading Organizations Are Getting The Most Value from IT.
My immediate takeaways align with our strategy (warning for confirmation bias) to provide a business low-code platform that lets our customers transform their businesses with maximum ability to handle the "unknown, unknowns."
The first thing business users want is to avoid any mention of the legacy system. "Can't we just work around it?" they ask at the start of every project. There is a perception that legacy systems somehow prevent innovation by standing in the way of rapid product development or quick fixes to address customer requests.
Much current thinking on competitive positioning (for example, the Harvard Business Review here; Gartner Research here; and Forbes Leadership Insights here) is to focus on experience, not products. Many leading companies have found that a structured product development process no longer provides a sufficient or effective compass for determining how a company can best solve customer needs.
With respect to William Shakespeare, that is the question.
In the age of the connected customer, the only thing that differentiates a brand is customer experience (CX). Increasingly, those experiences are not human, but digital and automated. This puts IT teams in a situation of both opportunity and vulnerability.
Imagine the magic of bringing an idea to life during a requirements meeting. Perhaps you do this already using a whiteboard or tablet, or even paper napkins. But consider the impact you could have if a solutions architect configures the processes, business flows and the attributes into the application during the discussion.
The question; "What keeps you up at night?" is a commonly used executive thinking exercise that is revered and reviled in equal measure. Sure, it's a good way to focus attention and conversation on the things that are most mission critical. It's also a demotivating assumption that there are elements of your business that should give you stressful sleeplessness! This question can feel like an attack on our management skills. Perhaps even more frustrating is that for most of us, those stressful projects are real - and really do keep us up at night.
Knowing how much technology drives business performance and customer engagement today, wouldn't it be nice to say YES more often to business growth ideas? Unfortunately, too many pushes for traditional digital transformation fail to account (and budget) for the very real impact on developer resources, harmonization and application portfolio management.
