The primary aim of each CIO’s agenda is changing throughout the past few years and even now. It shifted from capability and optimizing cost to speed. Now, it focuses on business differentiation. The CIO’s main goal is to pre-empt and comprehend the infiltration of digital-native rivals.
After years of experience, we can say that spry thinking combined with IA or intelligent automation has the capability of unleashing a trend of co-innovation across organizations and can have meaningful outcomes and market gains as a result when applied properly.
How This Has Been Made Possible
When commercial IT became popular, functional areas supported big-shot enterprises. For example development, test run or test support and design.
Inducements for the individual practical head established greatly on their development capability within their range of ability which resulted in a decrease in cost.
The factory model also became prevalent soon enough as it came out as a method to attain advantages from the propensity to develop IT scale and across the organization build standardization.
The model primarily bases its work on driving efficiency and to do that it takes help from automation for the repeatable tasks covering each functional area. As a result, it delivered improved cost optimization.
In the case of automating one-off functional areas, the process led to soiled automation.
In the beginning, automation was for repeatable tasks and was not configured for variable tasks or activities (for example regression test cases) and to administer utility codes which help update server connections as well as activate jobs to unblock the blocked queues and many more.
CIO is More Valuable Than Before
Recently, the role of the CIO has changed drastically and everyone in the business has noticed its potential.
Pundits predicted a decade ago that the CIO would lose their impact gradually in the executive suite.
They also predicted that IT would have more potential and become more than just a service bureau and enhance its customer service responses as well as responses to the business unit’s queries.
However, the predictions did not come true as the CIO has more power than ever in their own rights with their enhanced customer experiences, production of new business models as well as growing innovation of the employee.
A Different Focus in the Workforce
The CIO comprehends the need for transformation as achieving digital transformation will also bring transformation in their workforces.
There is a scarcity of experienced tech workers is driving alteration. Many enterprises shifted their focus on reskilling as retaining valuable tech employees is a priority now.
CoE is planning on including professional developers along with change management professionals, business analysts and process experts who have prior automation experience and expertise.
CoE, in general, consists of a dedicated team of people setting standards, development assisting and providing consulting.
They also supervise how the enterprise use automation initiatives to progress throughout the years.
RPA is another important asset that allows enterprises to enable automation initiatives to maximize returns on their investment.
Automation – Its Development Throughout the Years
In the 90s, the landscape of IT changed with the emergence of the commercial internet. The market was full of new technologies and among these were the new browsers such as Safari, Windows IE, Netscape, etc.,
Search engines, Oracle, JavaScript, CSS, HTML and many more. The next 10 to 15 years witnessed the rise and downfall of various similar technologies, tools kits and programming languages.
Though there were some developments with this technology, for example, the web development tool kits and web automation, some technologies stayed unchanged such as organisational design.
Thus, it created soiled automation which continued to occupy its space.
However, at the beginning of the last decade, the IT operational equation changed because of the improved network connectivity, the onset of the cloud, and enhanced digital technologies that include IoT (Internet of things), full-stack technologies and big data.
There came a new genre of start-ups that provided various innovations like customer-centric experiences, quicker buying cycles, personalised marketing campaigns, etc. this helped bring the technologies to the forefront which in turn played a part in the reclining of businesses across industries.
With this disturbance in the digital market, established organisations had to deliver IT speed, resulting in welcoming digital-native approaches and technologies to develop new applications and infrastructure.
This is the primary reason why this period got its characterization as continuous automation. Here the principles of DevOps and Agile were in to fulfil the business purposes of offering new business capacities at speed.
With this in hand, there came two major changes in the world of automation and both of the changes based their foundation on a special breed of strategies and tools.
- Processes that one functional area will use to bridge with another and automate the process.
- Within the functional areas, the automation of non-repeatable tasks happened.
A change was necessary for the skills to provide the customers with continuous automation.
Given the IT functional area had an impeccable workflow all over, the single skilling gave birth to new hybrid roles to bridge the capacities, for example, a tester that knows coding, business analysts that possess design knowledge, a coder that has experience in operational functions, and many more.
The acquisition of DevOps accelerated further because of continuous automation as it facilitated key alterations in organisational design, skill sets methodologies and tooling.
For instance, breaking down financial silos at a large-scale global payment card organization and assisting it to adopt more supple ways of operating, while concurrently re-architecting the landscape of the technology to achieve enhanced outcomes.
This method helped the organization attain more than 25% of the usual product releases.
Present Day and What Future Holds
The objective of the CIO shifted from offering at speed to developing business differentiating abilities.
CIO has now put more effort into designing a slackly combined infrastructure with the help
of componentized microservices approach to enhance the existing IT architectures’ agility
and improved functional availability and elasticity (delivered through the cloud).
These alterations directly enhance business agility and consequently offers improved customer experience.
A thorough comprehension of the technology and domain is necessary to convert
monolithic IT into a supple contemporary digital foundation developed on a microservices
architecture.
Testers, developers as well as designers have to comprehend the end-to-end organisational
flow of all the value streams and attain in-depth knowledge about multiple technologies
because the architecture is modular.
Technologies that cut across all the coating of architecture like microservices components,
databases and UI or user interface are absolutely indispensable.
To get the most out of this architecture, IT organisations need to accept cloud capabilities
like workload elasticity, resilience and scalability as they promote execution speed, improve
customer experience and dynamically identify issues with security.
Conclusion
After the organization gets an agile architecture lined up for enterprise outcomes, business
collaboration and tighter IT achieve supplemental differentiation. Then a new culture of co-
innovation will be able to arise which will be of great help to enhance the agility of IT as
well as elucidate the undocumented prospects for the business.
The owners of the business products who possess an understanding of different IT
elements can then solidify a value proposition to end customers which is technology-driven.
Business contexts and the buying culture of the final customer need to be understood by
technology leaders so that they can contribute to driving significant co-innovation success.
Co-innovation has the power to ease business differentiation as it extends the goal of every
enterprise by building a new genre for services and products that focus on unique and new value theories.
