CIOs Lead the Return to IT and Delivery Basics by Mark Hewitt
In H22023 and 2024 as we look to a probable turbulent financial environment ahead, CIOs and IT teams are returning to basics. Hardening and maintaining core capabilities while experimenting with a limited number of innovative projects are a good way of covering essentials while being open to advances and easy wins.
Three key strategic areas of priority are:
Standardizing, training toward, socializing, adhering to, and maintaining core enterprise architecture. Enterprise architecture should ideally be documented and comprehensive, and can include software, data, security, and infrastructure. Non-functional requirements should be captured along with functional, as they give substance to decisions that make up the architecture; for example, factors such as speed, reliability, portability, data integrity and environment specifics. This is particularly true as it relates to harmonizing operations with teams in data engineering where experimentation rapidly transitions to essential, efficient and mainstream operations supporting corporate differentiation.
Stabilizing foundational capabilities to ensure reliable delivery and business continuity. Resilience is the name of the game as we look ahead. Team competence, and an agile mindset help teams weather challenging times while pivoting as needed. Soft skills and communication mesh with collective approaches and documentation to help consistency between teams. Companies which have undertaken and succeeded in their agile transformations are able to deliver incremental results and sustain a more consistent cadence of delivery. Organizations that have not begun the Agile journey should consider partnering with expert consultants to model, coach and care for results and ensure proper adoption by their IT teams.
Fortifying QA and DevOps teams to test and regularly deliver business outcomes. QA and DevOps capabilities are a backbone of an organization's ability to deliver in an agile fashion, and neglecting them can be as detrimental as forgetting process and architecture. More than ever testers need to understand the business translation of what is needed, and integrating QA team members in requirements and design phases adds efficiencies in defining robust acceptance criteria. Unification and automation of processes requires a common team understanding of development life cycles, DevOps culture and its philosophy, practices, and tools. These tenets of IT require documentation, training to institutionalize, commitment to staffing, and regular communication with IT team members and key business stakeholders.
Resilience and business continuity are terms du jour, and are increasing in importance as the economic headwinds lie just ahead. Looking toward H22023, organizations need to ensure the core IT operations and foundational investments are sound. There is less room for failure, and success demands a balance between reliably keeping the lights on, and spending your one to two innovation tokens wisely.