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.
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.
No business is safe from digital disruption. Even if you have embraced cloud and on-demand systems in your IT organization, your business is still vulnerable to market and competitive pressures to stay connected in real time with customers and partners. Technology is pervasive - and that means employees and customers want to work on the go, connect seamlessly and have up to the minute data at their fingertips. Their expectations are high. Oh, and did we mention that this all needs to be secure, reliable and flexible?
