Insights
(Source: BCG)
In what feels like a minute, the world has gone massively digital. People are doing everything online because of COVID-19, and the strain is showing. To the extent that the global economy is running, it’s doing so on digital sales and distribution. In Europe, performance levels of videoconferencing platforms plunge the minute the US wakes up and goes to work. And besides testing the limits of existing infrastructure, the virus has got tech talent working around the clock.
It’s inevitable that companies looking for ways to counteract the effects of the pandemic on their operations will ask their technology function to bear part of the burden. But they must be strategic about any shifts made to the tech workforce. To ensure that vital digital services remain up and running, organizations must do everything possible to protect mission-critical talent. By showing their support now, companies can create goodwill that will carry over to when better times return.
(Source: BCG)
Budget constraints are a fact of life for chief information officers, and they have coped in the past by leveraging digital capabilities to operate more efficiently and lower headcount. But today those budget constraints are amplified by the need to modernize the IT environment. The dilemma that many CIOs find themselves in is how, under these budget constraints, to pay for vital modernization initiatives and avoid further headcount reductions.
The answer, we believe, is to transform the organization and change the ways of working by adopting a platform-based IT organization. This new setup promotes the agile collaboration of functional and technical experts so they can align on and implement business solutions, increasing speed to market and productivity by two to four times. These improvements can fuel the budget to modernize IT while accelerating value generation and maximizing customer/user satisfaction. With this in mind, we have identified five principles to make platform-based IT organizations work: semiautonomous decision making, client and user centricity, advanced IT and data capabilities, highly skilled teams, and agile at scale.