Insights

(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.