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IT Adding value to the business agenda


The other day I was having an intense debate with a friend of mine regarding the real value of an IT organization. He argued that IT is not longer the true add value organization it used to be in the 90’s or at the beginning of the 21st century. This mainly due to the fact that some of its heritage competences and skills has been moved progressively to other business areas (process modeling are now managed within each of the functional areas or then lead by a separate Lean – Sigma6 organizations, data modeling and data architecture are also cover by specialists within the business functions, the Cloud concept and the related storage market has made possible to move the infrastructure landscape out of the operational control of company IT functions by outsourcing this services, etc.

Complementing these ideas, today I read an interesting article at InformationWeek produced by the Forrester Research group predicting that most of the IT functions will gradually disappear sometime by 2020 embedded in various customer-facing teams. Whether this is resulting from the consumerization, commoditization of IT technologies or whether a new management trends and business strategies will force the IT leader to deal with a new paradigm, the fact is that the future CIO or Head of IT will become more and more a Service Outsourcing dealer with the need to integrate, negotiate and organize all the different technology suppliers and third-party partners  




If at the end this forecasted trend becomes a reality then the CIO will need to develop a cooperative relationship and business role at a complete new scale that the one he/she is used to. The CIO role will internally become more a cost reduction specialist and contract management, with the need to focus on vendor selection and financial optimisation than ever. This to me is a first step towards a final and definitive integration of the IT role into the Financial area.

However to better figure out what will drive organisations towards the final decisions, we have to take into account that IT play also a key role in the day-to-day business transformation and related conflict management, plus on the business innovation agenda. These business revenue drivers are currently well established on the foundations of the services provided by IT. It will be very difficult for the CEO to find another spot for them in a different business function than IT.       

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