Reimagining enterprise IT for uncertain future

Reimagining enterprise IT for uncertain future: leaders must not build departments around single hypothesis of future.

Extract from source article at ComputerWorld UK:

IT leaders need a posture of future-readiness, allowing them to adjust to what happens next in the changing  geopolitical, economic, regulatory and technical realms. Envisioning possible futures, their demands on IT and ways to meet those requirements will help them to identify strategies they can put in place three or four years from now.

The role of the information technology department is under scrutiny in a way that makes its past challenges seem almost quaint by comparison. One of the reasons for this is the increasing power and utility of the technology that exists on the outside. Employees are getting their work done using free Web applications as well as their own laptops and smartphones. Traditional IT function roles are being displaced.

It may be an exaggeration to say that IT departments should go the way of telephone operators, but the function is clearly primed for reinvention. According to a recent survey, IT was chosen most often as the function business executives would most like to build from scratch. We need to give credit to today’s CIOs for understanding the need for change: IT executives singled out their own function as a target for reinvention by an even larger margin.

But how should enterprise IT evolve? What will it look like in five years from now, and what should be its roles, responsibilities and business goals? These are the questions that executives are debating. Less than a third say they have a clear vision of how their IT function will look by that time. Something that is particularly unsettling is the lack of clarity about the CIO position itself. Barely one in five business executives say they know what the CIO role will look like in five years. For executives with that title, this makes figuring out the future a matter not just of professional duty but of career survival.

To arrive at a new vision of enterprise IT, CIOs and senior business executives should focus their efforts on creating enterprise IT functions that are “futures ready.” A futures-ready posture recognises that it is short sighted to bet on a single outcome. It is much better to recognise the radically different ways in which the business environment could change, imagine how IT might adapt to those changes, and have the judgment, readiness and courage to evolve when the time comes.

More … http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/si-and-tech-insights/2012/08/reimagining-enterprise-it-for-an-uncertain-future/index.htm?