Cost reduction and efficiency is visible. Flexibility and ability to lead through uncertainty is valuable. On which have you focused your organization?
Reviving old priorities will not quell adoption challenges that are formidable obstacles to establishing competitive advantages. These challenges must be solved by designing a new decision structure and forming a new innovation skeleton. This innovation skeleton demands a new construction and the foundation is not ROI, it is faith.
This concept of faith (trusting your leaders) is difficult to fund and even harder to monitor because it is qualitative initially, and doesn’t succumb well to quantitative analysis. Digital is new–faith in people and those whom lead your organization is not.
The Gartner 2015 CIO Agenda highlights the importance of value over the visible and emphasizes the belief that change equals faith in great leaders. Digital success is fueled when executive leadership acknowledges that our organization’s future is in the hands of our best and worst leaders. Whether action is taken or not, this fact remains steadfast. This acknowledgement helps reinforce employee trust in leadership.
How is an organization’s security footprint hardened? How are cloud services leveraged for business use? How are business functions and technical components consolidated for shared services? Faith in people.
End-of-life ideas like “credit the leader” or “blame the leader” do not work today. They don’t drive value. They don’t even grow visibility. We must promote our faith in leaders as executives. Jim Collins articulately concluded, “We keep putting people in positions of power who lack the seed to become a Level 5 leader, and that is one major reason why there are so few companies that make a sustained and verifiable shift from good to great” (Collins, 2005)
An IDC FutureScape Report predicts by 2017, 80% of a CIO’s time will be focused on analytics, cyber-security and creating new revenue streams through digital service (IDC, 2014). Digital services don’t drive revenue until they provide value for a better customer experience. That value begins with faith and trust in leaders.
References:
Collins, J. (2005). Level 5 leadership: The triumph of humility and fierce resolve. Harvard Business Review, (July)
International Data Corporation (IDC). (2014). IDC reveals CIO agenda predictions for 2015. Retrieved from http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25225314