IT Strategy: how to empower the business with a technological perspective

IT Strategy: how to empower the business with a technological perspective

In a reality where digitalization is an uninterrupted and necessary process, organizations have the obligation to adapt continuously and rapidly to support their existing capabilities.

One of the major issues that this entails is related to the difficulty for companies to resolve different scenarios simultaneously with complexities that they have not experienced previously.

In this context, it is indispensable to have a technological strategy that allows for supporting the current business and enabling the future.

And that, fundamentally, consider and prioritize:

• People
• Processes
• Technology

In addition to clearly establishing the steps to carry out the transition without disruptions, accompanying the organization in its correct deployment.

One of the great questions about this is precisely when is the best time.

No, there is no single answer: from when we need to define a general work plan that ensures the current functioning of the organization and the future sustainability of the business, when we wish to drive the organization's evolution and prepare it to enable new capabilities through the incorporation of new skills, as well as in instances where the goal is to scale or extend the existing business by broadening products or services, increasing their reach, or incorporating new ones, these all present themselves as key situations to promote it.

In addition, we can say that having a strategy with this focus allows for adapting the IT organization to:

• New business models
• Identify friction points across the entire organization and define a roadmap of actions to eliminate them
• Increase the maneuvering capacity and speed of adaptation of the organization to frequently changing requirements.

While this is easy to understand, the maximum complexity lies in its implementation: most companies do not have the competencies and resources to carry them out autonomously.

That is why they require support from specialized organizations, many of them in the form of consultancies, which can guide and orient the process.

As a consequence of how imperative digitalization is, these types of companies are appearing more and more in Argentina; an example is Ingenia, which has a focus on technical and technological architecture and in recent years has managed to expand to Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Spain.

It is important to understand that the generation of an IT strategy requires a highly instantiated process. Enabled by specialized profiles such as:

Enterprise Architects, Technological Architects, Solution Architects, and Team Dynamics Experts, as part of the joint definition of the product vision and technological vision, together with an assessment of the organization's current situation.

After that, an operating model is established that includes the required organizational functions, roles, and responsibilities, along with workflows for the development, evolution, maintenance, and operation of IT solutions.

Once that stage is finished, it continues with the implementation and adoption roadmap of the proposed strategy. Of course, this is not complete and will not reach a true implementation if the external team does not assist in the adoption of the proposed strategy.

With the knowledge transfer completed, it is very likely that internal personnel can ensure that the next milestones are carried out in a solid and dynamic manner.

In short, nowadays organizations have the need to leverage their businesses through a comprehensive medium- and long-term technological perspective. Because in a competitive environment, those who only look at the tree and not the forest are left out.